I’m old enough and have been around long enough to remember when Rep. Brian Baird toured local Democratic organizations to personally explain his support for the surge in Iraq toward the end of the George W. Bush presidency. Baird had been one of the few Democrats to take a principled stand against much of the post-9/11 reaction. But after firsthand experience in Iraq, he changed his position and decided to support the surge in late summer 2007.

I remember a small afternoon meeting between Baird and the leadership of the Thurston County Democratic Party (of which I was a minor part). This was followed by a larger, heated gathering at Capital High School weeks later where he was grilled by attendees.

I bring up this bit of history because there’s been a lot of recent talk about Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and how she often cuts against the grain of national Democratic politics. But the Washington Third Congressional District has a history of electing Democratic representatives who do just that.

Since the 1980s, when national politics began to overtake regional identities, Washington’s 3rd District has elected three Democratic members of Congress, each with their own version of iconoclasm. Instead of being standard-bearers for a national party line, they’ve often resembled regional throwbacks, like a Yellow Dog Democrat from the South or a progressive Republican from the North.

Let’s go all the way back to Jolene Unsoeld, an Olympian who served in Congress after Don Bonker (a pro-logging, pro-labor, post-Nixon Democrat) and lost her seat in the 1994 Republican wave.

Unsoeld got her start in politics pushing for open government, leading the campaign for the initiative creating Washington’s campaign finance disclosure system. She entered office as an outsider and, in many ways, stayed that way, even while in Congress. Known for her deep convictions and distaste for spin and backroom deals, she routinely defied party expectations.

Her stance on guns was emblematic of this independence. In the state legislature, she supported moderate gun control, backing a bill that let police revoke concealed weapons permits from those convicted of carrying while intoxicated. But in Congress, her approach shifted. She opposed a blanket assault weapons ban, instead proposing a more targeted amendment to limit only imported assault weapons.

This frustrated progressives in her base, especially in Thurston County, who saw it as a betrayal. But her decision reflected a balance between her liberal values and a libertarian skepticism of federal overreach, one that aligned with many rural constituents.

Linda Smith, a hardline small-government conservative, defeated Unsoeld in 1994. When Smith ran for Senate in 1998, Brian Baird swept in and won the seat by ten points, after nearly unseating her two years earlier by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Baird’s own iconoclasm became clearest in his stance on the Iraq War. Like many Democrats, he initially opposed the 2003 invasion. But after visiting Iraq in 2007 and observing the U.S. military surge firsthand, he reversed his position, arguing that the strategy was working and that pulling out too early could lead to further chaos.

This change put him at odds with most of his party and with anti-war activists who had previously supported him. He defended the shift by saying it was grounded in evidence and experience, not ideology or political pressure. His support for the surge, he said, wasn’t about justifying the invasion but about honoring a moral obligation to reduce harm.

A year later, Baird’s independence cut the opposite way in foreign policy. After the 2008–2009 Gaza War, he was the first U.S. official in over three years to enter the Gaza Strip. Acting without the Obama administration’s approval, he publicly condemned the humanitarian devastation caused by Israeli military actions, calling the destruction “shocking and troubling beyond words.”

Baird even suggested that U.S. military aid to Israel should be used as leverage to change Israeli policy, a position almost unheard of in Congress. Few lawmakers were willing to even broach the idea of conditioning aid to Israel. But Baird did, again based on what he had seen for himself.

Which brings us to Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

There are two particularly thoughtful pieces of writing about her I recommend: one by Warren Neth and another in Lower Columbia Currents.

A couple of quotes I want to pull out. First, from Neth:

Gluesenkamp Perez didn’t win by mimicking Trump, nor by abandoning the core of left economic values. She won by being real. But there’s a cautionary tale here: even candidates with deep working-class resonance risk losing their edge if they’re folded too neatly into establishment politics.

If Perez is Trump’s kryptonite, it’s because she offers a materially grounded, culturally fluent alternative to the right-wing populism that dominates districts like hers. But kryptonite doesn’t work if it’s locked away in an iron box.

Then from Currents:

It’s true that MGP defies stereotypes. The daughter of a Texas preacher who attended liberal Reed College and who co-owns a Portland auto repair shop, she’s equally comfortable quoting scripture and dropping “F” bombs.

On one hand, she shares progressive views on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and access to childcare. But she take conservative positions on gun rights and supports the timber industry. (A well-used 1950s chain saw hangs in her congressional office.)

But before we get too deep, it’s important to note that Olympia is no longer in the 3rd District. After the 2010 redistricting, WA-10 was created and carved Olympia into a Pierce County-centric district, leaving only a conservative southern slice of Thurston County in WA-3. That slice got even smaller in 2020.

This matters. Brian Baird used to win the district with over 60% of the vote. In the post-9/11 2002 election, his Republican opponent only got 38%. The district Gluesenkamp Perez represents today is much more conservative and significantly more rural.

And politics themselves have changed. Readers of this blog should remember that Rep. Albert Johnson once represented WA-3 in Congress. Johnson is a significant and dark figure in Washington and American history. His eugenics-driven immigration policies were a direct translation of Washington’s own racist legacy, one designed to exclude anyone but white people from the economy.

The worldview of Albert Johnson has found new life in the Stephen Miller wing of today’s Republican Party. Gluesenkamp Perez’s politics cut directly against this foundation, focusing instead on the root economic insecurities that fuel movements like those of Johnson and Miller.

It is worth taking time to pull back the zoom lens on the day-to-day, vote-to-vote politics around her and take a look at her broader beliefs. Congressional politics, by default, are built around the bricks made available by the votes she needs to take. But her actual politics are deeper and different. Her recent interview with Ezra Klein cuts deeper into her personal politics and includes several standout moments:

  • On the “dignity and indignity” of work: She challenges a cultural hierarchy that devalues manual labor and glorifies office work, calling this mindset “deeply toxic.” She argues that people want to be useful and self-realized without needing a college degree, and that multiple forms of intelligence deserve respect.
  • On tariffs and domestic production: She acknowledges that tariffs can be misused, but sees them as potentially productive tools to encourage local manufacturing. She points to Canadian lumber dumping as a factor in the loss of local mills. (While I didn’t cite Don Bonker as an iconoclast earlier, it’s worth noting that he launched his national political career fighting raw log exports, which he saw as harmful to local jobs.)
  • On small-scale localism: Her economic vision centers on local self-determination, durable production, and skilled trades over cheap consumption. She advocates for policies that help people own property, build long-lasting products, and reclaim practical stewardship of resources. Her environmentalism is rooted in local realities, not just consumer choices.

This isn’t the kind of rhetoric you usually hear from a seasoned politician. It’s more like someone who just discovered Wendell Berry. And while Unsoeld and Baird ran against the grain of national politics in their own ways, Gluesenkamp Perez does so even more starkly, and necessarily, given the changing realities of both her district and our broader political landscape.

But in a lot of ways, Gluesenkamp Perez is a throwback to a form of Democratic politics that once thrived in resource- and industry-dependent regions like Southwest Washington. The idea that the economy should serve the people is hardly a radical stance in that tradition. What’s striking, though, is how deeply rooted her views are in a broader rethinking of how the economy is organized. Her politics aren’t just about protecting jobs; they’re about recentering economic life around human dignity, local resilience, and self-determination. That kind of economic vision, grounded in the lived experiences of tradespeople and rural communities, is rare in today’s national political landscape, and maybe exactly what the national discourse needs.