A House district in Washington state may be more difficult for the GOP to hold after Republican primary voters drove out their incumbent lawmaker who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Last month, Republican Joe Kent beat Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in Washington’s all-party primary. Trump endorsed Kent’s insurgent bid against Herrera Beutler in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, a southwest Washington seat to which Herrera Beutler was first elected in 2010. In February 2021, she joined nine other House Republicans in voting to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, and the former president vowed revenge.
Kent and Herrera Beutler come from starkly different factions of the GOP. Herrera Beutler is a part of a small group of Republicans willing to impeach Trump for his role in fanning the flames of the riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, while Kent is one of Trump’s staunchest supporters.
The chasm between Herrera Beutler and Kent may be too great a divide for voters in the highly independent district, which includes a growing swath of communities populated by commuters who work in more liberal Portland, Oregon, about 14 miles away from Vancouver, Washington (Washington has no state income tax while Oregon does). Some independent voters who previously supported Herrera Beutler may not go for Kent, a retired Green Beret who is running on a hard-right platform including his embrace of Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen 2020 election.
Some of Kent’s controversial positions include comments about the events of Jan. 6. Kent, a technology project manager, has said an otherwise peaceful crowd at the Capitol was influenced by “deep state” agents. He’s also called for the release of “political prisoners” held on charges tied to storming the Capitol that day.
Then there are Kent’s unorthodox foreign policy views. Speaking remotely from his Washington state home to a conservative foreign policy conference regarding Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Kent claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial demands for the Crimea peninsula and elsewhere were “very reasonable.”
“Putin has laid out what he wants in Ukraine — a decent starting point,” Kent said, arguing that the United States should be “pragmatic” about the conflict.
Kent’s stated position is something of a distillation of Trump’s America First foreign policy, drawing it out to its most isolationist point. But Kent’s position arguably goes further than congressional voices questioning the wisdom of U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).
Meanwhile, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto repair shop owner, is running a campaign designed to appeal to those same centrists and independents who may not be inclined to vote for a hard-right candidate.
On her website, Perez’s campaign says she “is exactly the kind of working class Washingtonian that has been left behind in this economy and frankly ignored by the political extremes in our Nation’s Capital.”
That approach may work: A recent internal poll from Perez’s campaign showed Kent trailing her by 2 percentage points. The survey also found Perez leading him in favorability ratings by more than 10 points, with an accompanying memo suggesting that this shows substantial room to win over undecided voters.
Although the poll is not an independent survey, it came amid other warning signs that Republicans will have a more difficult fight nationally than expected in November as forecasts have shifted to show Democrats’ odds improving in the midterm elections. After Kent became the district’s Republican nominee, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its rating of the race from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican,” meaning a move toward Democrats.
House Republicans need to net five seats in the 435-member chamber to win a majority for the first time since the 2018 elections.
In 2010, Herrera Beutler flipped the district back to Republican control after the retirement of 12-year Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat.
The district supported Trump in 2020, with the then-president carrying about 51% of the vote, marking a 4-point margin of victory. However, Herrera Beutler outperformed Trump in the district in 2020 in the general election, carrying the district by about 13 points. Republican primary voters would go on to reject her in 2022 in the primary, which under state law had all candidates running together regardless of party.
Flipping the district would not just be a notable pickup for Democrats. It may also be key to a vast regional shift. If new Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola holds her seat in Alaska and Democrats win in Washington’s 3rd District, as well as California’s coastal Orange County 45th Congressional District where Republican Rep. Michelle Steel faces a tough reelection fight, then Democrats would represent the entire Pacific coastline.
