Aging Bridge is a flashpoint in the competitive Washington State House Race

The first thing Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez told donors gathered at a recent wine and cheese campaign fundraiser was the role she played in securing $600 million in federal funding to rebuild one of America’s major thoroughfares the region, the outdated Route I-5. bridge.

“Bringing that grant home was a dogfight,” said Ms. Perez, 35, a first-term Democrat from a rural working-class district in Washington state who twice voted for former President Donald J. Trump and faces one of the toughest re-election races in the country this year.

“My community is going to build that bridge,” she told the room full of gray-haired donors gathered in a crowded living room in Washougal, Washington, with giant windows overlooking the Columbia River. “This is our job.”

Ms. Perez sees this funding as a major coup for her district and her re-election campaign. But the bridge in one of the nation’s most competitive districts has become a political piñata in the race, which will almost certainly pit Ms. Perez against far-right Republican Joe Kent, whom she defeated by less than 1 percentage point in 2022. .

Mr. Kent, who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election and has called those jailed for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol “political prisoners,” has branded the rebuilding plan an “Antifa superhighway.” He has claimed that the proposed project, which includes light rail and tolls, will bring unwanted urban elements from Portland into the car-centric, predominantly white community of Clark County, Washington, essentially serving as “a highway for crime and homelessness in Portland.” Vancouver,” he wrote on social media.

It’s an example of how Republicans, many of whom oppose President Biden’s sweeping trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, are trying to turn even the most basic local issues into battlegrounds in the country’s culture wars during this year’s election , in which control of Congress is at stake. . Kent’s attacks, which rely on buzzwords from the far right, put the bridge at the center of a national political debate that vilifies the left and plays on fears of demographic change.

“We don’t want the problems of downtown Portland to be dumped directly into our Vancouver district,” Mr. Kent said recently in a Facebook Live chat. “If you look at the murder rate and the crime rate, that’s the last thing we want in Vancouver.”

Republicans have long opposed investments in public transportation, preferring instead to spend on highways. Mr Kent says he wants the historic bridge to be preserved and more lanes added elsewhere to ease traffic congestion.

Mr. Kent declined to be interviewed and agreed to provide only written comment for this story. After The New York Times sent his campaign a list of questions, his aides published them along with the answers in a press release.

In the release, Mr. Kent denied that he was playing on racist fears by opposing the bridge project and accused Ms. Perez of lying about her role in financing it, while also blaming her for mishandling the bridge project.

“The drug addicts and criminals in their tent colonies spreading their crime from Portland to Vancouver are almost entirely white, and Antifa is overwhelmingly white,” Kent wrote.

Although predominantly white, Portland has the largest immigrant population in Oregon and has seen more than 1,400 refugees from Afghanistan arrive since August 2021. As the city struggles to provide temporary shelter for migrants arriving from the southern border, Mr. Kent claimed that Democrats are allowing “illegal invaders” to flood into American communities.

Mr. Kent said Ms. Perez’s real priorities were “protecting the rights of biological males to invade women’s sports, spaces and bathrooms” and said her full involvement in financing the new bridge included “ writing a letter to Pete Buttigieg,” the Secretary of Transportation.

In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg said Ms. Perez “absolutely played a role” in the project’s selection to receive the largest grant of its kind.

“We choose projects based on their merits,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “Effective advocates help illustrate these merits.”

Built in 1917, the Interstate 5 bridge is one of the two major intersections between Washington state and Oregon, with about $132 million worth of freight crossing the bridge every day, as well as about 69,000 commuters from Ms. Perez’s district. It is the main connector for an entire region of the Pacific Northwest, but is widely believed to be at the end of its life.

The area has become so busy that vehicles crawl across the area at speeds of 55 kilometers per hour for many hours a day. The entire structure is supported by piles of Douglas fir trees sunk into the mud – “pretzel sticks in chocolate pudding,” as Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle likes to describe it – putting it at high risk of total collapse. of a major earthquake.

“There are projects that are simply too large and too complex to be accomplished through existing financing mechanisms,” Mr. Buttigieg said, explaining why the project had received such a large grant. “Additional support is needed.”

He described the Interstate 5 bridge as the “worst freight bottleneck in the region” and said it was an example of “a state-of-the-art bridge designed 100 years ago that can and should be replaced .”

In 2022, Ms. Perez, who ran a car repair shop, defeated Mr. Kent, a Trump-backed retired Green Beret whose wife had been killed fighting ISIS, by just two votes in each precinct in the district. Now Mr. Kent is back, hoping to be swept to victory with Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket.

There are other Republicans running in the primaries, but Mr. Kent’s emergence from that small field is already considered a fait accompli; the state Republican Party suspended its articles of association so it could support him in the primaries and outside groups trying to maintain Republican control of the House of Representatives plan to support him.

And Mr. Kent has already made the Interstate 5 bridge a focal point of his campaign.

“Voters across the district are uniting behind my message of common-sense conservatism: build a bridge with no tolls and no light rail, get spending and inflation under control,” he said.

As she traveled through her district in her Toyota Tundra in the rain and snow last week with her dog Uma Furman in tow, Ms. Perez said she tries not to think about Mr. Kent too much. “I really try not to get into his head so much. I shouldn’t get into DC’s head, nor into Joe’s head.”

Ms. Perez tries to stay in the minds of her constituents. On Capitol Hill, Ms. Perez is the rare Democrat who often breaks with her party on big votes, often drawing the ire of progressives who she believes do not value working-class priorities.

“On the floor I really have to pay attention to my voices,” she said. “It’s this constant analysis of, ‘How much can I afford to piss people off to do what I think is right?’”

Ms. Perez was one of four Democrats who voted for an annual defense policy bill that Republicans loaded with conservative social policy mandates that would limit access to abortion, transgender care and diversity training for military personnel. She defended the vote, saying it was important to support the military and that the Senate would always “clean up” the bill by removing partisan amendments she disagreed with.

She also sided with Republicans on a bill to repeal Mr. Biden’s student loan relief initiative. And Ms. Perez has supported the censure of two Democrats, Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Yet Mr. Kent has portrayed her as a supporter of Democrats and Mr. Biden, attacking her for opposing a tough immigration law, among other things.

It has left Ms. Perez in a bit of a political no man’s land. In the capital, her social circle consists mainly of two Republican Bible study groups, including Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the current chairman of the Republican House campaign arm who is actively pushing her toward defeat.

Ms. Perez, along with other Democrats representing districts Mr. Trump won, “received a passing grade last cycle; no one has laid a glove on them,” Mr. Hudson said during a recent briefing with reporters. He said his job was “to inform voters about their data.”

Still, Ms. Perez, whose father was an evangelical pastor, says she often feels more at home among religious Republicans.

“I feel like my party is ashamed that I am a Christian,” she said. She is broadly dismissive of some of her own colleagues’ values, which she believes are out of touch.

“I hear my colleagues complaining that they don’t make enough money,” she said of her fellow lawmakers, who make $174,000 a year. “Do you know what the average income is in my community? You should be ashamed of yourselves.” (The median income in her district is $43,266.)

When Ms. Perez was elected, her Republican opponents tried to portray her as someone who would operate as an undercover, West Coast version of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another young working-class woman whose election to Congress no one saw coming. But Ms. Perez said she has little in common with the progressive New York star, nor does she have much in common with the other young women in Congress, even socially.

“Our districts are really very different,” she said of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s very lonely, working all the time. You go back to your apartment, eat some frozen peas and go to bed.

At the evening fundraiser last week, Ms. Perez focused on her work on local issues, but under pressure from donors eager to express concerns about Mr. Biden and his re-election campaign, she had little praise to offer.

“I am not here to apologize for his actions or his messages,” Ms. Perez said. “I am very dissatisfied with the way Biden is using his power, but when does it become a choice between that and Trump?”

Later, as she sat in her old auto shop office before catching a flight back to Washington, Ms. Perez tried not to worry too much about what would happen if she lost her re-election race. She would return to this simpler life, she said, and be happy not to miss so many bedtimes with her toddler. But the idea of ​​losing to Mr. Kent was difficult to accept.

“It’s just very obnoxious and condescending for him to take on the mantle of fighting for the little guy,” she said. “It might work for one election cycle, but people are going to need jobs. It works until the bridge collapses – and then what?”