Letters to the Editor: Does a rural Democratic lawmaker hold the keys to her party’s success?

To the editor: Columnist Mark Z. Barabak dispenses pablum from people with critiques of Democratic messaging in 2024. (“She’s won twice in Trump country. What can this Democrat teach her party?” column, Nov. 19)
Washington state’s Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez told Barabak, “It’s the wrong idea to take away from this that I’ve got some 10-point plan.” But the next piece of advice from Gluesenkamp Perez, as summarized by Barabak, is incoherent: “Perhaps above all, run more candidates who’ve gotten dirt under their fingernails.”
She says, “The track record of success is not whether you went to an Ivy League institution.”
This analysis ignores the non-Ivy League presidential candidate with french-fry grease on her hands who ran against a University of Pennsylvania alumnus with bone spurs during the Vietnam War.
Barabak would do well to remember that Kamala Harris would be the president-elect if 237,000 swing-state voters had not chosen Donald Trump, Jill Stein or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Among the 7 million voters in Pennsylvania, Harris lost by only 1.7 percentage points.
Based on the actual results, I’d say the Democrats’ messaging needs minor tweaking, not wholesale revision.
Kathi Smith, Ojai
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To the editor: In writing about Gluesenkamp Perez’s victory in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, Barabak missed something.
While receiving more votes county-by-county (there are seven in her congressional district) than Vice President Kamala Harris, she decisively lost the five “rural” counties, including Skamania County, where she resides. The only county she won by a wide margin was Clark County, the only truly urban county in her district, and only a bridge away from Portland, Ore.
The election result clearly demonstrated that Gluesenkamp Perez’s political fortunes don’t lie in the rural counties of the 3rd District, but in Vancouver, Wash. An economics graduate of the elite Reed College, she certainly knows this.
Gluesenkamp Perez’s cowboy boots schtick likely will have to be abandoned sooner rather than later. I happen to like a lot of what she says she stands for and gave her my vote.
John McDonald, Vancouver, Wash.