Democrat Marie Gkusenkamp Perez, who won the rural 3rd district in Washington recounted her awkward meeting with kamala Harris during the campaigning. In an interview with the New York Times, he said she initially had high hopes when Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee but she never got a phone call for her. “When Harris first came out, I was open to talking with her. I know she called a lot of my colleagues; she never called me,” the Democrat said. “I’ve had one interaction with Harris, at her Naval Observatory Christmas party.”
“I’m not super comfortable at that kind of thing. I’d had a couple of beers, and I noticed that almost all of the garlands were plastic. My district grows a hell of a lot of Christmas trees,” she said.
“I was strong-armed into taking a picture. I said, ‘Madam Vice President, we grow those where I live,’” Gluesenkamp Perez went on.
“She just walked away from me. There was kind of an eye roll, maybe. My thinking was, it does matter to people where I live. It’s the respect, the cultural regard for farmers. I didn’t feel like she understood what I was trying to say.”
Perez ran ahead of Harris by several points and appears to be heading toward re-election, and she told the New York Times that national Democrats didn’t speak to the worries of her district, such as the fentanyl crisis and the high cost of food.
“People are putting their groceries on their credit card,” she told the New York Times. “No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.”
“It’s a lot easier to look outward, to blame and demonize other people, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing what we can do. It is not fun to feel accountability. It requires a mental flexibility that’s painful,” Perez said. “So who knows?”
