I’ve been following WA-03 very closely ever since the primaries, when White nationalist and regional embarrassment Joe Kent narrowly upset incumbent Jaime Herrera-Beutler (one of the 10 R’s who voted to impeach Trump), 22.8% to 22.3%, and got into the district’s Final 2.
All the media noise was about Kent (whose tragic personal story might be touching, until you notice his actions and opinions — dude, go get some treatment and stay out of public life at least until you’ve healed yourself a bit). No one seemed to care that the #1 spot was taken by Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, a political newcomer who was just about the perfect Dem candidate for this light-red district.
I guess the conventional wisdom went something like, “She only got 31%, almost all the rest went to Republicans (in retrospect, apparently many Dems wanted to protect the incumbent), it’s a ‘Red’ district (not quite), it’s a pro-R environment, the party still backs him (to their eternal shame)”, etc.
But to me it was evident that electing Joe Kent was a huge mistake by local Republicans. Up and down most of the West Coast, outside truly deep-red pockets, people have very little appetite and tolerance for MAGA shit. Surely not at the extreme level that Joe Kent represents (and which David Neiwert has done an amazing job of exposing here). WA-03 population is mostly the WA suburbs of Portland OR; not exactly MAGA HQ.
Simply put: the moment MAGA voters squeaked Kent into 2nd, they made this race eminently winnable for Dems. Particularly considering the quality candidate we have in WA-03.
Oh! And I actually wrote this here, right after the primaries! I totally forgot about that diary.
But the race was off most people’s radars. Even here initially when front-pagers put together “Let’s Play some Offense” donation lists, WA-03 was not on them. I presume that loud screaming from the site’s PNW corner (yours truly included) has changed that fairly quickly. Thank you!
Some analysts had this district as “lean R” or even “likely R”. Others didn’t have it anywhere on their competitive lists. 538 had Kent winning by anywhere from ~7% (their hedging “lite” model) to ~13% (their default “deluxe” model which was what everyone saw and reported). One reason I was more optimistic (cautiously) about the House in general, is because I knew this was bullshit, and therefore much of their (and others’) House model had to rely upon bullshit assumptions. 538 bros, this district is only R+5, the other side has a shit candidate and we have a great one. This race was going to be close.
Still, Marie’s election night lead — almost 6%! — was a huge shocker. I had to check the names and numbers 3 times to make sure I didn’t get it reversed in my brain.
Then starts the nail-biting as our all-mail-vote results are notoriously drifty. Most of the state tends to drift left with the days, but WA-03 is a vortex where things often drift right.
Wednesday night, Marie’s margin drifted down by ~1%. Nothing to see here.
Thursday night, the lead was suddenly halved to <2.3%! Wow, this gave me palpitations. Worst of all, Clark County where the bulk of population lives and where Marie’s still winning by double-digits overall, had a substantial net gain for Kent. Count-wise, Marie’s election-night 10k vote lead narrowed to <6k, with ~30% remaining to count. Will the extremist close the gap?
Today’s a Federal holiday so not all counties dropped ballots, but Clark did. Today their bit was almost a wash. Marie now leads by 4959 votes which is 1.7%. But most of the (rather limited) reduction in her margin came from the smaller counties.
According to the WA SoS vote-reporting page,
- Clark has ~20k votes on hand, and will report again tomorrow at 4.
- All the other counties seem to have <10k WA-03 ballots among them, in total. All but one other county went to Kent, but the average margin is less than 60:40. Late-breaking votes probably more slanted than that, but likely no more than ~2:1 based on returns till now.
- Only one other county (Thurston, a generally blue county of which WA-03 has caught a red corner) is slated to report tomorrow — the rest only next week.
Marie’s campaign has been expressing confidence even after Thursday’s ballot drop. And tonight her consultant Sandeep Kaushik wrote
[Kent] once again fell short of the gains he needed
The Seattle Times (not linking) estimated Kent needs to win 61% of the entire remaining vote (which again, is mostly in Clark where today was close to 50:50). This suggests they think there are only 22-23k ballots remaining to count. If tomorrow’s drop is also close to a wash, then it’ll likely be game over for Joe Kent and, as Dave Wasserman put it today directly addressing WA-03 — possibly the biggest upset in the entire 2022 U.S. House election (unless CO-03 eclipses it, here’s hoping!).
At least to those not paying attention to details and local context.
I’ll be crossing my fingers tomorrow and until this drama is over.