A good woman is crucial to find
By 
In marginal races where candidate quality matters, sometimes you need some luck. Democrats in WA-3 got one break when the district’s Republicans defeated Jaime Butler Herrera, against whom the Dems would have almost certainly been drawing dead, and ran creepy fascist nut Joe Kent instead. But even that, in itself, probably wasn’t enough. The Democrats managed to find a candidate who really had it:
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 that 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.”
2. Voters can see the link between abortion bans and authoritarianism.
During her campaign, Gluesenkamp Perez spoke about having a miscarriage and being forced to make her way through a wall of protesters to get medical care at a Planned Parenthood clinic. While Kent called for a national abortion ban, she appealed to her district’s libertarian streak by including both gun rights and reproductive rights in her promise to “protect our freedoms.”
On Monday, she said that voters connected abortion bans to a broader narrative of right-wing radicalism. Even if voters thought abortion rights in Washington State were safe with Democrats in charge, the end of Roe showed that Republicans are willing to upend some basic assumptions undergirding American life. “It made people take Republicans, especially the extreme wing, seriously when they say they want to defund the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I.,” she said.
Another lesson here is that that while Dems running tough races have to be moderate in some respects that doesn’t mean running away from the party on everything, either. A good candidate can make, for example, abortion rights part of a narrative that can appeal to cross-pressured voters.
I recommend the rest of the column too. For all the charges Democratic politicians get for being OUT OF TOUCH, increasing numbers of younger Republican candidates have been living in a completely closed media ecosystem for a while, with the result that sometimes it’s impossible to make heads or tails out of what they’re doing if you don’t spend 5 hours a day watching Fox News while constantly refreshing Libs of Tik Tok and Greenwald in permanently open tabs. Outside of deep red districts these candidates will appeal to the most active Republican primary voters and nobody else. And for once Josh Hammer is right — let’s have more of them please!
Absolutely. Try to find a ghoulish venture capitalist who looks like he has five padlocks on his deep freezer and believes that Social Security should be eliminated and the state should make teaching about the 14th Amendment illegal to run in every district! Sounds great.