Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez fights to keep a foothold in Pacific Northwest's Trump country

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez carried a dull kitchen knife and two pairs of rusty scissors through a county fairgrounds south of Seattle. She handed them to Beverly Phoenix, who sat hunched over a table in the back of an exhibit hall, volunteering to help neighbors breathe new life into old tools. Now she offered advice to a member of Congress on using a Dremel, a handheld oscillating device, to sharpen the blades.

It was an unassuming campaign stop that reinforced Gluesenkamp Perez’s message of self sufficiency. The owner of an auto repair shop with her husband, Gluesenkamp Perez has positioned herself as someone who can help her party bridge the divide between urban and rural, blue collar and white collar, left and right. If Democrats are going to take back control of the U.S.

House, they need to hold districts like this one in Southwest Washington, which twice elected Gluesenkamp Perez while also supporting President Donald Trump in all of his campaigns. Although the party has been fixated on whether to accommodate the burgeoning progressive movement, Democrats’ willingness to make room for more moderate and unorthodox members could be even more important to winning and maintaining a durable majority. “We are a really independent community.

What we want is respect for our priorities, for our values,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. When that causes friction with party leaders, she said, her job is “explaining my community to D.C., not letting D.C. try to define my community’s priorities.” To prove herself, Gluesenkamp Perez, 38, will have to win a very different kind of campaign this year.

In her last two elections, she faced Republican Joe Kent, who had connections to extremists. Now she’s up against a more mainstream opponent in John Braun, a businessman and state legislator with a better shot at appealing to the district’s moderate voters. Gluesenkamp Perez is a lightning rod for progressive criticism The Pacific Northwest has a reputation as a bastion of progressive politics, but Washington’s 3rd Congressional District is more complex.

It includes both the northern portion of the Portland, Oregon, metro area and expansive rural territory with economies centered around fishing, logging and manufacturing. By balancing those competing interests, Gluesenkamp Perez sometimes finds herself in a lonely group of Democrats siding with…