On Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's rurality, and how that helped her win Washington's 3d congressional district

Michelle Goldberg wrote for the New York Times about the race for Washington's 3d congressional district in late September (and I wrote about that column here).  

Now, in the wake of Gluesenkamp Perez's win, Goldberg follows up with her four takeaways from this campaign, including this first one, which touches on rurality:

1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.

Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.

“I hope that people see this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”

For the record, Skamania County's population is just 12,000, but it is exurban Portland.   That said, Gluesenkamp Perez's campaign ads did a great job of playing up the rural parts of her background, showing her on an all-terrain, off-road vehicle on the property she owns with her husband.

Oh, and I don't hold it against her at all, but Gluesenkamp Perez does have a degree from uber liberal and uber urban Reed College in Portland.  

Postscript:  I love this Nov. 19, 2022 tweet from Gluesenkamp: 

It reminds us of her working-class life (the auto repair shop) and her rural life, too (the trees).  It reads:  "First trip to D.C. since 9th grade.  Not enough trees in this town.  There wasn't time to sightsee, just learn the ropes, but I did manage to pick something up for the fridge at the shop."  

Photos from her twitter feed this week also showed her meeting another woman who inspires me enormously:  Mary Peltola, who is now a certainty to retain the seat as Alaska's at-large member of Congress.  

Postscript:  In the Nov. 28 episode of the NPR Politics podcast, Ximena Bustillo awkwardly refers to Glusenkamp Perez's entire district as rural, though it includes the city of Vancouver, Washington, part of the Portland, Oregon metro area.