EGN NEWS DESK
The very first thing Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez informed donors gathered at a current wine-and-cheese marketing campaign fund-raiser was of the position she performed in securing $600 million in federal funding to rebuild one of many area’s primary arteries, the getting older Route I-5 bridge.
“Bringing that grant residence was a dogfight,” mentioned Ms. Perez, 35, a first-term Democrat from a rural, working-class district in Washington State that twice voted for former President Donald J. Trump, and who’s going through one of many hardest re-election races within the nation this 12 months.
“My neighborhood goes to construct that bridge,” she informed the roomful of gray-haired donors gathered in a packed lounge in Washougal, Wash., with large home windows overlooking the Columbia River. “This is our work.”
Ms. Perez considers this funding to be a significant coup for her district and her re-election marketing campaign. But the bridge in one of many nation’s best districts has develop into a political piñata within the race, which is all however sure to pit Ms. Perez in opposition to the far-right Republican Joe Kent, whom she beat in 2022 by lower than 1 proportion level.
Mr. Kent, who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election and has referred to these jailed for collaborating within the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol as “political prisoners,” has branded the reconstruction plan an “Antifa superhighway.” He has claimed that the proposed undertaking, which features a gentle rail and tolls, will carry undesirable city components from Portland into the car-centric, predominantly white neighborhood of Clark County, Washington, successfully serving as “an expressway for Portland’s crime & homeless into Vancouver,” as he wrote on social media.
It is an instance of how Republicans, lots of whom opposed President Biden’s sweeping $1 trillion infrastructure legislation, are searching for to rework even essentially the most primary of native points into battlegrounds within the nation’s tradition wars in elections this 12 months wherein management of Congress is at stake. Mr. Kent’s assaults, which depend on buzzwords of the onerous proper, place the bridge on the heart of a nationwide political dialogue that vilifies the left and performs on fears of demographic change.
“We don’t need the issues of downtown Portland dumped proper into our district in Vancouver,” Mr. Kent mentioned just lately in a Facebook Live chat. “If you take a look at the homicide price, the crime price, that’s the very last thing we wish in Vancouver.”
Republicans have lengthy opposed making investments in mass transit, favoring spending on highways as an alternative. Mr. Kent says he desires the historic bridge to be preserved, with extra freeway lanes constructed elsewhere to alleviate congestion.
Mr. Kent declined to be interviewed, agreeing to offer remark for this story solely in writing. After The New York Times despatched his marketing campaign an inventory of questions, his aides blasted it out in a information launch together with responses.
In the discharge, Mr. Kent denied that he was taking part in on racist fears in opposing the bridge undertaking and accused Ms. Perez of mendacity about her position in funding it, at the same time as he blamed her for mishandling it.
“The drug addicts and criminals of their tent colonies which can be spreading their crime from Portland into Vancouver are nearly completely white, and Antifa is overwhelmingly white,” Mr. Kent wrote.
While Portland is predominantly white, it has the most important immigrant inhabitants in Oregon, and has seen greater than 1,400 refugees arriving from Afghanistan since August 2021. As the town has struggled to offer short-term shelter to migrants arriving from the southern border, Mr. Kent has claimed that Democrats are permitting “unlawful invaders” to flood into American communities.
Mr. Kent mentioned Ms. Perez’s true priorities had been “defending organic males’s rights to invade ladies’s sports activities, areas and loos” and mentioned her whole involvement in funding the brand new bridge consisted of “writing a letter to Pete Buttigieg,” the transportation secretary.
In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg mentioned Ms. Perez “completely had a job” within the undertaking being chosen to obtain the most important grant of its variety.
“We select tasks based mostly on their deserves,” Mr. Buttigieg mentioned. “Effective advocates assist as an example these deserves.”
Built in 1917, the Interstate 5 bridge is considered one of two main crossings between Washington State and Oregon, with about $132 million value of freight crossing the bridge each day, in addition to about 69,000 commuters from Ms. Perez’s district. It is the primary connector for a whole area of the Pacific Northwest, however it’s extensively believed to be on the finish of its life.
The span has develop into so congested that for a lot of hours a day, autos crawl throughout at 35 miles per hour. The whole construction is supported by pilings of Douglas fir sunk in mud — “pretzel sticks in chocolate pudding,” because the mayor of Vancouver, Anne McEnerny-Ogle, likes to explain it — that places it at excessive threat of complete collapse within the occasion of a significant earthquake.
“There are tasks which can be simply too giant and too complicated to be achieved by means of present funding mechanisms,” Mr. Buttigieg mentioned, explaining why the undertaking had acquired such a big grant. “There must be additional help.”
He described the Interstate 5 bridge because the “worst trucking bottleneck within the area” and mentioned it was an instance of “a bridge designed to the cutting-edge 100 years in the past that may and have to be changed.”
In 2022, Ms. Perez, who ran an auto restore store, beat Mr. Kent, a Trump-endorsed retired Green Beret whose spouse had been killed combating ISIS, by simply two votes in every precinct within the district. Now Mr. Kent is again, hoping to be swept to victory with Mr. Trump on the prime of the ticket.
There are different Republicans operating within the main, however Mr. Kent’s emergence from that small discipline is already thought-about a fait accompli; the state Republican Party suspended its bylaws so it may endorse him within the main and outdoors teams working to maintain Republican management of the House are planning to again him.
And Mr. Kent has already turned the Interstate 5 bridge right into a flashpoint of his marketing campaign.
“Voters all throughout the district are rallying behind my message of widespread sense conservatism: Build a bridge with no tolls and no gentle rail, get spending and inflation below management,” he mentioned.
As she crisscrossed her district within the rain and snow in her Toyota Tundra final week together with her canine Uma Furman in tow, Ms. Perez mentioned she tries to not suppose an excessive amount of about Mr. Kent. “I actually attempt to not get in his head that a lot. I’ve to not get in D.C.’s head and never get in Joe’s head.”
Ms. Perez tries to remain within the mind-set of her constituents. On Capitol Hill, Ms. Perez is the uncommon Democrat who typically breaks together with her party on main votes, typically drawing the ire of progressives who she says don’t worth the priorities of the working class.
“On the ground, I actually have to concentrate to my votes,” she mentioned. “It’s this fixed evaluation of, ‘How a lot can I afford to piss off folks to do what I feel is correct?’”
Ms. Perez was considered one of 4 Democrats who voted for an annual protection coverage invoice that Republicans loaded filled with conservative social coverage mandates that may restrict abortion entry, transgender care and variety coaching for army personnel. She defended the vote, saying it was essential to help the army and that the Senate was all the time going to “clear up” the invoice by stripping out the partisan amendments she didn’t agree with.
She additionally sided with Republicans on a invoice to repeal Mr. Biden’s scholar mortgage aid initiative. And Ms. Perez has supported the censures of two Democrats, Representatives Jamaal Bowman of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Still, Mr. Kent has portrayed her as in lock-step with Democrats and Mr. Biden, attacking her for opposing a hard-line immigration invoice, amongst others.
It has left Ms. Perez in a little bit of a political no-man’s land. In the capital, her social circle consists largely of two Republican Bible examine teams, considered one of which incorporates Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the present chairman of the Republican House marketing campaign arm that’s actively concentrating on her for defeat.
Ms. Perez, together with different Democrats representing districts that Mr. Trump gained, “acquired a move final cycle; nobody laid a glove on them,” Mr. Hudson mentioned at a current briefing with reporters. He mentioned his job was “educating voters about their information.”
Despite that, Ms. Perez, whose father was an Evangelical pastor, says she typically feels extra at residence amongst spiritual Republicans.
“I really feel like my party is embarrassed I’m a Christian,” she mentioned. She is broadly dismissive of a number of the values of her personal colleagues, whom she views as out of contact.
“I hear my colleagues complain about not making sufficient cash,” she mentioned of her fellow lawmakers, who earn $174,000 a 12 months. “You know what the typical earnings in my neighborhood is? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” (The common earnings in her district is $43,266.)
When Ms. Perez was elected, her Republican opponents tried to tag her as somebody who would function as an undercover, West Coast model of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one other younger, working-class girl whose election to Congress nobody had seen coming. But Ms. Perez mentioned she has little in widespread with the progressive star from New York, nor has she had a lot to do with any of the opposite younger ladies in Congress, even socially.
“Our districts are actually, actually completely different,” she mentioned of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. “It could be very lonely, working on a regular basis. You return to your condo and eat some frozen peas and go to mattress.”
At the night fund-raiser final week, Ms. Perez targeted totally on her work on native points, however pressed by donors desperate to vent their issues about Mr. Biden and his re-election marketing campaign, she had little reward to supply.
“I’m not right here to apologize for his efficiency or his messaging,” Ms. Perez mentioned. “I’ve quite a lot of dissatisfaction with how Biden’s utilizing his energy, however when it turns into a selection between that and Trump?”
Later, sitting in her previous workplace in her auto store earlier than catching a flight again to Washington, Ms. Perez tried to not get too labored up about what would occur if she misplaced her re-election race. She would return to this extra easy life, she mentioned, and be blissful to not miss so many bedtimes together with her toddler. But the thought of dropping to Mr. Kent was onerous to swallow.
“It’s simply actually obnoxious and patronizing when he’s assuming the mantle of combating for the little man,” she mentioned. “It may work for one election cycle, however persons are going to want jobs. It works till the bridge collapses — after which what?”
