The race for Washington’s 3rd congressional district is expected to be one of the most competitive in the nation this fall, thanks to a wave of redistricting across the U.S. that has left few seats in play for either political party.
Washington state holds a “top-two primary,” which means that the top two vote-getters advance to the general election in November, regardless of party.
Yet as voters head into the Aug. 4 primary, experts predict a fiercely partisan general election, with an incumbent Democrat fighting to hold her seat against a state senator who’s been endorsed by President Donald Trump in a deeply purple district.
Two-term Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is favored in a field of four Democratic candidates. The frontrunner in a field of three GOP candidates appears to be state Sen. John Braun, a Trump favorite who represents a rural legislative district that includes northern Clark County.
Whoever emerges victorious will quickly find themselves at the heart of one of the fiercest and most closely watched Congressional races — one of just 18 seats without a likely outcome in November out of the entire 435-member House of Representatives, according to the Cook Political Report.
“The third district nationwide is in the top five, if not the top three targets in the country,” said Justin Matheson, the Northwest Director for Axiom Strategies, a national Republican consulting firm, who is not involved in Braun’s campaign.
Primary ballots have already been mailed to Washington voters. Residents in the vote-by-mail state must have their ballots postmarked by Aug. 4 to have them counted.
Braun attempts to ascend from state to federal politics
On a recent Thursday, John Braun was looking out over the crowded assembly room floor of his family business, Braun Northwest. Welding torches crackled as aluminum walls, roofs and doors were stitched together into emergency vehicles below.
“Once the roof goes on that one, it’ll get lifted just like this one here with a hoist,” he said, motioning to a partially finished truck body.
“Eighty percent of our business is ambulances, but these two trucks here are crew transports for Cal Fire.”
The company, of which he is president, has just under 350 employees. They deliver approximately 360 emergency vehicles to customers per year, mostly around the Western U.S., he said.
Braun spends most of his time in the 20th legislative district, an L-shaped area that includes Lewis and Cowlitz counties, and north Clark County. He also serves as the Senate minority leader in the Democratically controlled state legislature
“Washington has been most successful when we had a little more balanced government,” he said. “No one would make the claim that it’s all that balanced in recent years.”
In Braun, Republicans have put forward a mainstream candidate who is less polarizing than his predecessor, Joe Kent, who ran and lost in the last two races for the 3rd District. Kent’s campaign was dogged by associations with right-wing groups including the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.
The Army veteran went on to be appointed by Trump as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center but later quit that job in protest as the U.S. was becoming entangled in the war with Iran.
Braun has been more focused on pocketbook issues like tax cuts and affordability than on “culture war” topics. If elected, he said, two of his biggest priorities would be keeping the federal income tax rate low and trying to control energy prices by promoting energy production from all types of sources.
“Don’t just talk about small businesses,” he said, taking a jab at his Democratic opponent. “How do you actually make it better for them? You make it by helping keep their costs low.”
Braun was endorsed by Trump in April. He said he largely agrees with the president’s policies, including on issues like military operations to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons and making cuts to the federal health care program known as Medicaid. One exception, he said, is the broad use of tariffs the president enacted at the start of his second term. The vehicles manufactured at Braun Northwest are made from aluminum, and Trump’s tariffs boosted prices and hurt his business, he said.
“While I wholeheartedly support the desire to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., I don’t think it’s as simple as changing the tariff in some cases,” he said.
To win the 3rd District, either candidate will need to do well in Vancouver, which has a population that’s nearly five times larger than Braun’s Senate district. His focus on taxes could resonate with voters there, who pay no income tax in Washington state but can also dodge the state’s 8% sales tax by heading south to shop in Oregon.
“We always called Vancouver in the Southwest, the tax nirvana,” said Matheson, the Republican campaign strategist. “What’s the old saying? ‘It’s the economy, stupid?’”
Gluesenkamp Perez will capitalize on a strong year for Democrats
On May 27, the day after a chemical disaster at a paper mill in Longview, Wash., killed 11 people, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez showed up to talk to victims’ families. Gluesenkamp Perez’s support of the Longview-Kelso community in the wake of one of the deadliest industrial accidents in state history was a crystallization of the Democrat’s campaign promises: advocating for people who work in the skilled trades and bringing money back to the district.
For days after the incident, she used her platform to pressure the owners of the paper mill to pay their idled employees into early August while the plant was shut down. The company recently extended workers’ pay into October. When news came out that the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the agency that investigates such incidents, had its budget zeroed out, Gluesenkamp Perez successfully lobbied for its full $14 million federal appropriation to be restored.
“Anytime a member of Congress can use their office to successfully help people, there’s a payoff electorally,” said Dean Nielsen, a Democratic political consultant in Seattle with CN4 Partners, who is not involved in her campaign. “It’s a classic example of, what is right as a member of Congress is also good politics.”
Gluesenkamp Perez’s specific brand of politics can be hard to pin down. While she’s running as a Democrat, she says she thinks of herself as an independent who follows the needs of her constituents rather than the ideological divides in Congress.
A bill she introduced this month about sea lions is one example of legislative work that doesn’t toe traditional party lines.
The Protecting Columbia River Salmon Act would allow Southwest Washington tribes to kill California and Steller sea lions in the Lower Columbia River if they’re preying on fish, including endangered salmon and steelhead. Sea lions are currently protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
A release from her office notes that California sea lion populations have increased substantially in recent decades, and they eat thousands of Columbia River salmon each year. Her bill received swift support from the Trump administration after it was introduced.
“I think representing a very red seat in a very blue state requires a level of candor and consideration about when the legislation isn’t doing what people thought it was going to do,” she said during an interview at her and her husband’s auto repair shop in Portland, Oregon, Dean’s Car Care.
Before Congress, she was a service writer at their shop, where she did the pre-diagnosis on cars to plan what kinds of parts they’d need for each repair.
“So, on the phone, trying to get people to tell you what they did to their car,” she said. “Because, basically the way you pay the mortgage is by having a turnover and making sure that you have the parts on hand.”
Gluesenkamp Perez has been the focus of intense criticism from Democrats and progressives in her district. Angry constituents have packed town halls over her support for Israel in its war with Hamas, and her 2025 vote in favor of the Save Act.
“Eighty percent of Americans believe that citizens are the ones who should determine the outcome of U.S. elections,” she said. “That is a majority opinion.”
That bill, if passed, could disenfranchise millions of voters by requiring documentation like passports or updated birth certificates that they may not have when registering to vote.
Earlier this year, she voted against an updated bill called the SAVE America Act. The legislation included more laborious photo ID requirements to allow people to vote and could have more widespread impacts on America’s election infrastructure.
Primary challengers across the political spectrum
Seven other candidates for the 3rd District from across the political spectrum are also fighting for a spot in the November election. Most notable is Vancouver Democrat Brent Hennrich, who has been waging a progressive campaign against Gluesenkamp Perez, in hopes of peeling off liberal voters who are dissatisfied with her voting record.
In interviews, Hennrich says he would advocate for universal health care and taxing the rich. But in a swing district where the top two candidates need to appeal to liberals and conservatives alike, the race heavily favors Braun and Gluesenkamp Perez.
“I don’t see any of the other candidates having a chance making the top two,” said Nielsen. “Will they carve out a not-insignificant share of protest votes? Absolutely, I think they will.”
Election turnout will be key
The turnout of each candidate’s base will likely be the deciding factor in a non-presidential year.
In the last two comparable midterm primary elections, voter turnout hovered around 40% in both Clark and Cowlitz counties. That number was twice as high during the last two presidential elections.
But Gluesenkamp Perez could benefit from Democrats’ anger at Trump to drive voters to the polls, experts said.
“I think sometimes some of these simple explanations are the most correct and the most powerful,” said Ben Gaskins, an associate professor of political science at Lewis and Clark College. “It’s a Democratic leaning year. The president and the president’s party is unpopular, and that may be enough to overcome any of the other kind of issues.”
Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign has raised more than three times as much money as Braun’s, according to the Federal Elections Commission. But with a nationally significant race, those contributions are expected to change before November.
“The money will come, and it’ll come big,” said Matheson with Axiom Strategies.
Others, like Nielsen, say that while this election looks good for Democrats, the outcome of the 3rd District is not yet decided.
“I also tell my clients, there’s two kinds of politicians: there’s paranoid and former,” he said.
