Democratic contender Marie Gluesenkamp Perez will be the new U.S. Representative from the 3rd District in Washington state after she defeated Trump-backed Republican pick Joe Kent in a surprise victory. FiveThirtyEight, which is an elections data and analysis site, gave the Democratic victor a just two percent chance of winning before the results were tabulated.
Gluesenkamp Perez is replacing outgoing Republican Jamie Herrera Beutler, who dared to vote for Trump’s impeachment after last year’s Capitol violence. Another GOP member of the House who did so, Michigan’s Peter Meijer, will also be replaced by a Democrat after Hillary Scholten clinched a win in the general election, setting her up to provide what is reportedly the first Democratic representation in the House for the city of Grand Rapids since the 1970s. In Washington, primaries are open, which in that state means candidates are presented to participating voters in a single list, with those who finish in the top two positions moving on to the general election. By a thin margin, Herrera Beutler finished third in the primary, meaning her defeat was secured. Gluesenkamp Perez received the most votes overall at that stage of voting.
Republicans have held the seat Gluesenkamp Perez will now take over for more than a decade: since 2011, when a wave of Republican victories in the first midterm elections of the Obama presidency provided the GOP with increased levels of control in key locales. Kent was closely aligned with former President Donald Trump on key issues, including the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, and after the Congressional race was called in the media for his Democratic opponent, Kent still wouldn’t concede. A media call doesn’t represent an official end to the race. Rather, it’s a mathematical calculation about the way a given election is heading. Concession isn’t legally required, but it means a losing candidate will stop trying to undercut the position of whoever was victorious. Kristina Karamo, the Trump-supported selection for Secretary of State in Michigan, has also refused to concede after losing the general election to the Democratic incumbent.
Gluesenkamp Perez won in Washington, where she will be representing a district in the southwestern part of the state including the city of Vancouver, by a margin of just 1.6 percent according to results available Sunday. Not much polling was conducted prior to the election, although the more recent survey from a pollster highly regarded for its accuracy found Kent leading. Other Trump-backed candidates for the House who lost include J.R. Majewski and Madison Gesiotto Gilbert in Ohio, Jim Bognet in Pennsylvania, and Bo Hines of North Carolina. The slate was a who’s who of nonsense, from Majewski’s deception about the actual nature of his experience in the military to Hines raising the prospect of at least certain members of the local community deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to allow victims of rape and incest to receive abortions.
