The fight for control of Congress is centering on one competitive district in southwest Washington state, according to NPR. The 3rd Congressional District is a mix of urban, industrial and rural communities, with inland and coastal areas, and it prides itself on its political independence. Donald Trump won the district three times, but Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez flipped it in 2022, and Republican nominee John Braun, a state senator, believes he has a shot at winning it back.

“A lot of districts these days are pretty predictable in terms of their politics,” Braun told NPR during an interview at his small manufacturing business. “The third is not. You got to go earn those votes.”

The race carries national stakes. NPR reported that Democrats likely need Gluesenkamp Perez to hold the seat if they want the House majority, while Republicans need Braun to win if they want to keep power and help shepherd Trump’s agenda across the finish line before his presidency ends.

Both candidates face headwinds. Gluesenkamp Perez is the incumbent in an election cycle experiencing an anti-incumbency wave. For Braun, who has Trump’s endorsement, the midterm elections tend to act as a referendum against the party in power, NPR reported — and Republicans have an unpopular president in charge.

Braun said voters expect their representatives to show up and explain their votes. “They want you and expect you to show up and represent their interests,” Braun said. “It gives you a little bit of freedom to vote more independently. But you also have to show up and explain your vote.”

The candidates are in many ways alike: both are considered moderates within their parties, both own small businesses, both live in rural towns, and both are centering the issues voters in the area care most about, including blue-collar work in manufacturing, natural resources and support for small businesses. They diverge on traditional partisan fault lines such as abortion.

Partisan politics don’t land well in a district that has long been one of the most competitive seats in Congress. Former Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler often faced fierce races to keep her seat and was ousted in the 2022 primary after voting for Trump’s impeachment following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“We don’t vote down the ballot one way or the other. Trump can win the city, but Marie Gluesenkamp Perez can win the city as well on the same ballot. So it’s really person specific,” Longview Mayor Erik Halvorson told NPR. “I think loyalty matters, especially for an incumbent. I think that polished candidates are not a necessary requirement for Longview and Cowlitz County. I think you just have to be authentic.”

Longview was founded to house employees of the local timber mill, but as the natural resource economy changed and the logging industry shrank, mills closed and jobs vanished. “I do feel like the tariffs have hit a lot of our industry here hard on the federal level,” Halvorson said.

Braun sees that economic pressure as his opening. He owns Braun Northwest Inc., an emergency vehicle manufacturing facility, and told NPR that tariffs have increased the cost of the materials used to build an ambulance or fire truck, with the price hike passed on to customers — in Braun’s case, mostly American cities and municipalities. Braun said his manufacturing background makes him uniquely qualified to advocate for the trades, something he did regularly during his time in the state legislature. Though Braun has Trump’s endorsement, he hasn’t pegged himself as a loyalist, and he said he would break with Trump on tariffs.

“There are some appropriate uses for tariffs. But kind of the indiscriminate use, the broad use, the blanketed use, just that doesn’t work,” Braun said. “We need to be a little more thoughtful on tariff policy.”

Vancouver, the district’s urban center, sits within the Portland, Ore., metro area, and locals argue the city’s identity is distinct. Gretchen Hoyt, whose family has lived there for four generations, said she was always slightly resentful of the two towns being treated as one. Vancouver has repurposed historic buildings into multiuse spaces, made downtown more walkable and built a waterfront along the Columbia River with luxury apartments and restaurants Hoyt described as “special occasion meals” — too pricey for locals to visit frequently. The investment has fueled growth, but Hoyt worries a place that once offered a reprieve from high Portland housing prices has developed a similar reputation for being unaffordable.

“It’s so hard to buy a house here right now,” she said. “It’s like everything … is over $700,000 and for things that are just aren’t worth that.”

Vancouver’s politics have also changed. Clark County, where the city sits, has slowly gotten bluer since 2008, and Hoyt said Vancouver itself has shifted toward the progressive side of the scale. That tilt is a problem for Gluesenkamp Perez, because Clark County is one of two counties she has consistently won since her first run for Congress. Two of her votes have riled Clark County Democrats: she voted for a Republican-sponsored bill dubbed “The Don’t Say Trans Bill,” which would require parental consent if a public school student wanted to go by a different name or gender in the classroom, and she voted for the SAVE Act, the Republican-led voter ID legislation, saying the bill would help secure America’s election system.

“People feel betrayed because people thought, ‘OK cool. She owns her own business. … Really. Like I’m one of you.’ Then it felt like that was just a schtick in order to get the blue vote,” Hoyt said.

Gluesenkamp Perez defended her SAVE Act vote in an April statement: “I do not support noncitizens voting in American elections — and that’s common sense to folks in Southwest Washington. Voting in our nation’s elections is a sacred right belonging only to American citizens, and my vote for the SAVE Act reflects that principle.” She did not respond to NPR’s multiple interview requests.

In response to her votes, progressive Democrats in Vancouver backed a primary challenger on Gluesenkamp Perez’s left. She ultimately won one of the top two general election seats in Washington’s open primary system, but the challenge exposed her vulnerability among the district’s Democratic base. “Nobody is happy with Marie, but they’re not voting for John. So they’re voting their conscience. It feels like the lesser of two evils,” Hoyt said.

The biggest challenge for both candidates is appealing to the district’s varied communities — urban Vancouver has different needs than the rural coastal towns along the ocean. Kathleen Nisbet, owner of Goose Point Oysters, took over her family’s shellfish farm in Bay Center, a town of about 200 people next to the Pacific Ocean. Nisbet, who has lived in the remote Pacific County town most of her life, said she has watched a once-prosperous area propped up by aquaculture turn into something of a ghost town, and she counted ten regulatory agencies she must pay and answer to, estimating around $200,000 a year in agency fees.

“The regulations that we have been dealing with for the last 25 years have impacted our areas in that we’ve lost our farmers and we’ve lost our fishermen,” Nisbet said. She said she is not against regulation, but that the rules are not streamlined, change frequently and are cost prohibitive for small and medium-sized producers.

Now Nisbet is dealing with a trade war as well. “We’ve lost over 50% of our international sales due to the current political climate between us and Asian countries,” she said. The backdrop to the trade disputes is a strong dollar: the Federal Reserve’s broad trade-weighted dollar index stood at 121.38 as of Oct. 11, a level that makes U.S. goods more expensive for foreign buyers. NPR reported the concern that if the trade wars continue or worsen, more farms will close or consolidate with big fisheries, and the identity of the area could disappear.

“We need to make sure that we are building community resilience through natural resources, which has been the traditional backbone of our communities,” Nisbet said.

Ilwaco, a coastal town of about 1,400 people, has had to pivot after declines in timber, seafood catches and cranberries. Its number one industry is now hospitality — restaurants, motels and small shops that welcome visitors, a significant portion of them traveling to or from Cape Disappointment State Park. The town’s only brewery, Ilwaco Cider Company, recently opened its doors. Councilman Matt Lessnau, who grew up in Ilwaco and moved back during the pandemic, said the cidery is the perfect example of what the town is trying to build. “It really has been a tremendous asset in really growing the kind of businesses that we want to see grow in Ilwaco,” he said.

The tourism season is limited: Ilwaco makes the majority of its revenue in the summer months and relies on federal dollars for infrastructure because the local tax base isn’t there — only about half the population lives in town full time.

The rural parts of the 3rd District have fewer people, but they remain influential. Pacific County voted for Trump in 2024 but also elected Gluesenkamp Perez, and she narrowly won the county in 2022 as well. Lessnau said a candidate needs to understand the local issues of the rural coastal towns to be electable, and needs to be relatable.

“We have historically valued representatives that understand our economy and our struggles,” Lessnau said. “We have a very low tolerance for bulls***.”