The Democrat who won in Trump country
28:23 Share

The rap on the Democrats in 2024 was that they only spoke to the very rich and the very poor, so they lost the working class. But not all of them lost. Marie Glussen Camp Perez did not just win, she won in Trump country. Democrats work in the trades. We live in rural communities. We are not the devil. We are your neighbors.

Before being elected, I ran an auto repair and a machine shop with my husband. And we live in unincorporated Skamania County, and our son is three years old now. Skamania County in Washington state has a national forest and a population of about 12,000 people. We get our internet from a radio tower. We get our water from a well.

In her first term, Glustenkamp-Perez crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans on behalf of her rural and working class constituents. And she horrified some Democrats along the way. Her plans to get things done despite a Republican majority in Congress coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from WebRoot. WebRoot believes in cybersecurity made smarter,

Creating software that harnesses the cloud and AI to stop threats in real time. It was designed to make your digital life better by protecting you from all kinds of threats. You can live a better digital life with WebRoot. And now you can get 60% off an exclusive discount for our listeners when you go to www.webroot.com slash today. That's www.webroot.com slash today.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud. This is Today Explained.

Last week, I went to Capitol Hill to talk to Representative Marie Glucencamp-Perez, who represents Washington's 3rd District. This is a swing district. It was held by a Republican for 12 years before she won in 2022. And this time around, Donald Trump backed her opponent, Joe Kent. So I asked her, why do you think you won? Well, I think...

What we want in Southwest Washington is to see our priorities and our culture reflected in Washington, D.C. We don't want a national agenda or a culture from somewhere else imported and replacing our community, our values, our priorities. And so just a real focus on that.

what my community needs, what our values are, who we are. You know, the district went for Trump by seven points in 16. And this time we were able to point to my record and say, like, I'm not here to play partisan football. I'm here because I see and value what we have. And I know it's worth fighting for. Beyond the student loan forgiveness, I looked at the data and

My district only holds 3% of the federally issued debt. This was a regressive tax policy.

If you support progressive tax strategies, you should do that consistently, not just when there's party favors. And I had people protest our auto shop. Just to clarify for listeners who may not know, you voted against President Biden's student debt relief. People looked at you and said, a Democrat. Oh, yeah. So they were really aggressive on our online reviews. We had...

take real pride in the quality of work we do. And had that taken, you know, people were just bombing it who'd never been customers. But hearing from my community, like, yeah, like, we don't want the trades to be considered as an afterthought. We don't want to be second fiddle and really challenging the idea that, like, academic intelligence is the thing that we should be supporting. We want good jobs that don't require a college degree. We want honors level shop class and junior high jobs.

Those are the things that reflect our values and our priorities. And so that's how I vote. The thing about national office, and I think this is where the pushback comes in, is when you vote, when you're in national office and you vote, you vote on something that affects everybody in the country. So not many people in your district ended up in a lot of college debt. But all across the United States, many, many, many young people did.

You're in national office. You don't just vote for this little corner of Washington because your vote as one of 435, it affects the whole country. How do you respond to that?

Well, my job is to represent my community, you know, the people that live where I live. And that's my role. And I think the way that you arrive at good policy is by having everyone show up at the table with the unique perspectives of their community and loyalty there.

And that is how you end up with better policy in the end. Like you don't get good legislation without having people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches at the table, not as an afterthought, but in the inception of the legislation.

Whether you support Donald Trump or are a critic of his, one thing that you can say he successfully did is he turned local issues national, right? Springfield, Ohio was struggling with an influx of immigrants. There is no reason that somebody in Maine or Florida or Texas should have cared at all about Springfield, Ohio. That was a local issue. Donald Trump took that local issue, made it a national issue. Some analysts say that is what helped him win. I think... Let me think about that. Like...

People want to be heard. I had a lot of people, colleagues, whatever, saying like, how do we get people to understand that the economy is actually great? Like, what do we need to say? This was the Democratic line. You don't. You don't. Okay. Don't do that. People are putting their groceries on a credit card. You know, it's like you go to Albertsons or whatever, your grocery store, and you feel like you're in...

a game of chicken with the CEO. And so don't gaslight people. Hear them when they are telling... Nobody cares about your spreadsheets, you know? And I think that is the loyalty that needs to guide any progress, getting back to a place where we are finding the non-political ways of conveying our values, you know, like...

I think, you know, people that can like get their Honda Civic to 500K miles, like that's cool. And when those people are regarded as, you know, like the vanguard of environmentalism, like I think that's progress. Like that is how you grow the field of people who feel real, like that is how you build a coalition that can actually pass change.

useful legislation. The person who gets their Honda Civic to 500,000 miles, as you said, is not usually identified as like, wow, that person's a great environmentalist. It's like, oh, that person is broke, right? And that's why they've run their car at a half a million miles. Good for them. But do you think there's a kind of snobbery within the Democratic Party where maybe the heroes that the party's choosing are the wrong heroes? Well, what I've seen being here is that

I mean, it feels like everybody is under 40 and has, like, at least two degrees. And, you know, that's not what the country looks like. That's not what the value system of merit is everywhere. Do you mean over 40 and has two degrees? Under 40. Under 40. Okay, you feel like Washington Congress is young. Oh, I mean, like, all of the...

Like staff and lobbyists and, you know, the people who are, you know, often writing legislation. Gotcha. Okay, keep going. Sorry. I was talking to a constituent. She works in child care. She told me she is not legally allowed to peel a banana or an orange. That is considered food prep. They are not a licensed food prep facility, so they can open a bag of chips, can't peel a banana. Okay.

And I went round and round and round for like four months. And I had my office like talking to local regulators and licensors and elected officials. And they kept saying, she's dumb. She doesn't understand the rules. Does she understand the rules? Yes. Okay. Their licensor said they would need six more sinks before they were legally allowed to be engaged in food prep. And I don't think this is a small thing. Like I have a toddler. I know how durable food preferences are.

Tell our toddlers. Yeah. Sorry.

at the core of the legislative process. Like, so I've introduced a bill that creates a positive right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. It says like, if your state's taking federal dollars for childcare, you will not infringe on the right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. And like, this is the long work of building strong,

local agriculture and national health. It is also, if we're being honest, in a tradition that more closely hews to what Republicans think. You're pointing to over-regulation and you're saying this is ridiculous. And I can imagine...

Democrats saying, but what about listeria? Every time you turn on the news these days, there is listeria in something, there's E. coli in something, you're going to give it to the kids. How do you square the party that you're in and the historical positions that it's taken on things like regulation? I don't know if it's like necessarily partisan as much as like parents know that food preferences in children are very durable.

And so my experience as a young mom is what's driving that, not like a partisan agenda. But I think that this is absolutely one of the reasons that there's one licensed daycare facility in my entire county. Think about the overhead of installing six things. So what are the ways that we can find structural reforms to build health, to build access, to provide quality care?

I think there's a conception that being the minority party in the House, the Senate, and not holding the presidency means you cannot get anything done. Certainly you don't seem like somebody who wants to spend two years just spinning your wheels. What's the plan? No. I mean, I, right, like, I miss my family. You know, I had better be productive if I'm not going to be with them. And I'm on a plane like every three days. I'm not doing that to just sit here and reflexively disagree.

It's as much as possible getting ahead of when a bill is dropped and figuring out what are the parts here that my community agrees with. How could I make this more reflective of our values, the fuller picture of a situation? Frequently just being from a rural community means that...

you know, that has not been considered by whatever committee staff drafted the bill. So getting our perspective, our values, our priorities baked in and then working on amendments afterwards. But, you know, I mean, elections have consequences. So, you know, I think it's important to hear what people are saying and with curiosity and figure out, like, what are the...

What are the shared parts we agree on? I don't know what bills will come to the floor, but I just continue to be myself and reflect my community and just work hard to knit our community back together. Representative Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, Washington State's 3rd District, thank you so much for taking the time. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. Coming up, so you're the minority in Congress. How to get things done anyway.

Support for Today Explained comes from Mint Mobile, the company that does not make you jump through hoops to get a great deal. When you purchase a three-month phone plan with Mint Mobile, you'll pay just $15 a month. No strings attached, says Mint Mobile. Just a great deal. All Mint Mobile plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text.

delivered on the country's biggest 5G network. You can even keep your phone, keep your contacts, keep the same number. You can get this new customer offer and a three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month by going to mintmobile.com slash explained. That's mintmobile.com slash explained. You can cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash explained. $45 upfront payment required. That's equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on their first three-month plan only. Speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on that unlimited plan.

Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions do apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Support for today explained comes from Aura. What will you get your loved ones for the holidays this year? Maybe an Aura digital picture frame? It was named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura digital picture frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and video directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can also get a free photo frame.

You can personalize it, you can preload it, maybe a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame. Immediately when I took the frame out of the box, I was impressed by the quality of the overall structure of it. I think when you look at previous digital frames that I've tried in the past, they kind of feel flimsy. The exterior of the frame is kind of falling off or just feels cheap overall.

This one had a sense of sort of weightiness and quality to it. For a limited time, you can visit AuraFrames.com and get $45 off Aura's best-selling Carver mat frames by using promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This exclusive Black Friday Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year, so don't miss out. Terms and conditions do apply. Support for today's explain comes from WebRootz.

Ever get one of those emails saying your package is missing and then you click the link only to realize it's spam? Or maybe you've had the IRS demanding payment in gas station gift cards? That sounds like a fun one. Or maybe you spotted a notification about a sign-in attempt from Moscow. Not so fast, Moscow. We've all been there. That's why WebRoot...

has set out to make a better digital life for all, WebRoot believes in cybersecurity made smarter, creating software that harnesses the cloud and AI to stop threats in real time.

You can live a better digital life with WebRoot. And now you can get 60% off an exclusive discount for our Today Explained listeners when you go to www.webroot.com slash today. That's www.webroot.com slash today. ♪

I'm Noelle King with Sarah Binder. She teaches political science at GWU. She's a fellow at Brookings. All right, Sarah, for the next two years, Democrats will be the minority in the House and the Senate. They will try to get things done anyway. Are there moments in the past where you can look back and say, dang, the minority really pulled that off?

George W. Bush in 2005, beginning of his second term, he and his administration is proposing to privatize Social Security.

give younger workers the option of putting a portion of their payroll taxes into a voluntary personal retirement account you are responsible for the investments of your social security right you take on the risk and democrats so it was a republican majority democrats in the minority in the senate they basically threatened a filibuster they said if you do this we're going to go ballistic today

As we are here on the floor of the House, House Democrats are offering a motion that will give members of Congress a chance to say exactly where they stand on the president's proposal on privatization. Our motion says... We're going to get the senior citizens on our side. We're going to defeat you.

not by voting things down, but by raising the stakes, right? Getting the public, getting their attention, getting them off the sidelines so that they are going to come to fight it as well. Over 300 town hall meetings have taken place or shortly will be, and we're now going on to the next phase of them. The Affordable Care Act under Trump in 2018 at that election, right? The minority party Democrats in California

in the House didn't really have a lot of power, but they could attract attention. They could say, "Trump wants to take away your health insurance for your children under 26. Trump wants to take away the protection for pre-existing health conditions." We all have reasons to fix our health care system, but Republicans in Congress keep voting to repeal Obamacare instead of fixing it. To take away health care from people with pre-existing conditions

He is just dead wrong, and that ain't going to happen. If seniors had to pay another $6,400 a year for health care, how would they manage? Eat less? Raise the stakes, get attention, right? The minority can do that, and that's often their key to power, right? Force the majority to make concessions or even sometimes to back down.

Today's Senate, you need 60 votes to cut off debate. Most majorities don't have 60 votes, right? The new incoming one is probably at 53. So if they can't get Democrats to vote with them to cut off debate, the Senate goes nowhere. In politics in 2024, a lot of the analysis that we're seeing about the Democrats losing the presidency, the House and the Senate...

suggests that Republicans are going to go ham and roll over their colleagues, get done what they want to get done. It's almost some of the analysis almost suggests that it's like kind of punitive. You guys lost. And so we are going to trample right over you. Was it always this way?

Well, over congressional history, we've, in American history, we've had periods of very high partisanship and very low partisanship. Sometimes it just means like the conservatives are on one side of the aisle and liberals are on the other side of the party aisle, and they have core disagreements about the role of government.

But today's partisanship, it's really almost, it's just, it's team play, right? Your team is against it. So my team's going to be for this bill, right? You can switch positions. Oh, your party used to be against it, but now you're for it. And so we're going to be against it. Like reflexive partisanship. You're for it, I'm against it. That...

seems a bit newer than we've seen before. Okay, so in the first half of the show, we talked to a young congresswoman who kind of made her name by crossing over the aisle. She's a Democrat and voting with Republicans, and the think pieces that have been written about her suggest that, oh my God, she's a traitor. How could she do this? I think what I hear you saying is once upon a time, it wasn't that way. It hasn't always been that way. Well,

We've had periods of time where within the Democratic Party, there were conservatives and there were liberals. We've had periods of time in the past where we had in the Republican Party, conservatives and liberals, right? We don't even have the term anymore, liberal Republicans, but we had them. We would usually put this period roughly...

mid-late 1940s and then petering out by the 1980s into the early 1990s. Who were the liberal Republicans? Senator Jacob Javits from New York. In our country, we don't tolerate police by terror taking the law into their own hands. He was a Republican, right? Senator Durenberger, a liberal Republican from the state of Minnesota.

Four years ago, you elected me to represent you in the United States Senate. I promised to stay in touch with you, that I'd represent your views, and above all, that I'd be myself. In his later years, Durenberger criticized what he called his Republican Party's hard swing to the right,

And he endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for president. And on the same token, we've had conservative Democrats, right? Even in the 1940s and 50s, we would say, right, segregationist Democrats, conservatives in the Democratic Party. These damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called civil rights.

And I tell you, the American people from one side or the other had better wake up and oppose that program. Today's parties just don't look like that.

But we do see these bipartisan pairs. I think it's important to get below the surface of where most of the spotlight is. You do see, not on big major bills, a bipartisan pair is not going to reform and fix Social Security. But a bipartisan pair might deal with a special problem in an agricultural office. Loans aren't going through. Subsidies aren't working. So there is room for bipartisanship there.

But oftentimes there are a lot of incentives not to work with the other team. We've talked about how people at times have crossed party lines, teamed up on things. There does seem to be another way that the minority party can get things done. And that is to not get things done, to hold things up to whatever extent they can. And I think in 2024, a lot of people are wondering, oh, will they try it this time? Can you tell us what it looks like when that happens? Yeah.

Sure. So probably the most famous or infamous of these efforts by minorities and at times minority parties, but minority groups to block majorities, especially in the Senate, was the efforts by Southerners to block action on protecting civil rights, right? Anti-lynching laws, anti-Poltex laws. The minority party, or at that time really a minority coalition, was

filibustering in the Senate to block forward action on major civil rights measures.

We're going to give this fight against bureaucratic tyranny and totalitarianism everything we have. In a period of unified party control, minority parties have been better suited toward blocking things. Or maybe sometimes we might say moderating majority agendas. The most recent example.

clear version of that was Trump in 2017, Republican House, Republican Senate. Republicans in the House had voted 60 times in the past decade to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It was top, top priority. And technically, it was blocked because Senator John McCain, a Republican, broke from his party. Prompting an audible gasp in the chamber.

But keep in mind, what did the Democrats do? They made sure the public was very aware that it was the Trump administration and Trump trying to take away their health care rights. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated. So that's how minority parties can try to make a difference here by blocking things is just elevating and getting the audience out of the bleachers and onto the field to try to block the majority.

However, there were a number of big issues tackled that Democrats were part of. Renegotiating and redoing NAFTA, the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. House Democrats, led by Speaker Pelosi in 2019, played a big role. Opioids addiction, that was bipartisan. Sanctions on Russia,

That was bipartisan. So Democrats did not sit out the first Trump administration. They found some common ground, particularly with the Senate, not necessarily initially with President Trump, but tried to use it to move those priorities closer to their own.

The challenge here for the Democrats this go-round and for future minority parties is it's hard to break through the public's attention. I think in part because many partisans are in their own news bubbles, right? And so let's say the Trump administration decides it wants to cut spending on health care for the poor. Is that going to be shown on Fox News?

I don't know. Right. And so the Democrats have to figure out who they want to get off the sidelines. And so it's a challenge, I think, to find ways to reach different generations and how to break through these media silos that often people are stuck in. This is how I think about it.

Unified party control of government does not last very long. On average, unified party control basically lasts two years, two, three years. So majorities like to overreach and voters often make them pay the price. Sarah Binder of George Washington University and Brookings. Today's team, Victoria Chamberlain, Peter Balanon-Brosin, Amina El-Sadi, Patrick Boyd, Andrea Christen's daughter, and me, Noelle King.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe.

Stripe is a payments and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like Uber, BMW, and DoorDash. Stripe has helped countless startups and established companies alike reach their growth targets, make progress on their missions, and reach more customers globally. The platform offers a suite of specialized features and tools to fast-track growth, like Stripe Billing, which makes it easy to handle subscription-based charges, invoicing, and all recurring revenue management needs.

You can learn how Stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at Stripe.com. That's Stripe.com to learn more. Stripe. Make progress.