WelcomeFest, held at DC’s Hamilton Hotel on June 4, was the largest post-2024 election gathering to date of self-described centrist Democrats seeking to revive their party’s fortunes. Promoted as showcasing a “common-sense” lane for the party, the event ended up revealing the persistence of an exhausted ideological scaffolding. Politico cast it as a clash between “a who’s-who of center-left Democratic politics” and progressive upstarts. Progressive outlets, for their part, seemed baffled by the proceedings: The Nation called the gathering “weird as hell,” while The American Prospect sneered that it “wants politicians who choose to believe in nothing.”
The truth is that the terms that framed the event—centrist, moderate, center-left—obscure as much as they reveal. That is especially true when it comes to the most interesting figure on stage: Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the 37-year-old auto-repair-shop owner turned politician who shocked pundits by flipping Washington’s 3rd District in 2022 after a decade of Republican rule. At one point during the event, pundit Matt Yglesias called her “a legend in the moderate community.” It got a laugh, but it also revealed the broken logic at work: When someone doesn’t fit the script, the political class folds them into it anyway.
“National outlets have leaned on familiar labels to characterize her.”
Ever since Gluesenkamp Perez’s 2022 upset, national outlets have leaned on familiar labels to characterize her—“moderate,” “centrist”—as if her win in a Trump district could only be explained by ideological triangulation. But Gluesenkamp Perez isn’t splitting the difference between two poles so much as she is working from a different starting point, centered on repair, ownership, and trade work.
Washington State has lost roughly 19,000 manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, the steepest drop in the country. Glusenkamp Perez’s politics are a quiet but forceful repudiation of the policies inflicted on districts like hers: factories offshored, wages flattened, families shoved into a gig economy that worships scale over craft. It is not the kind of “moderate” politics one finds in prosperous suburbs.
When we spoke on the phone recently, Gluesenkamp Perez offered a vision of neighborliness and communal self-sufficiency inspired, she told me, by the writer Wendell Berry. “You don’t need a planning commission if you don’t covet your neighbor’s land,” as she put it. The line distills her view that people deserve control over their communities, their work, and their hours. Top-down bureaucratic meddling isn’t necessary in high-trust communities, which can only exist when the government secures broadly shared prosperity.
That may sound like a call for less regulatory meddling. It is partly that, she admits, but reducing this core responsibility to technocracy ignores what has been lost. Re-investing in domestic manufacturing and the trades, she said, is “the precursor to having really high-quality schools and neighborhoods where kids can ride their bikes safely.” Stability is the baseline, not the ceiling.
“Work is fun—pleasurable even—exploitation is the problem,” Gluesenkamp Perez told me. Her aim is to design systems “where exploitation is harder and where it’s easier to hold value in things that are valuable in themselves, like land.” Freedom, in her account, isn’t the license to consume without limits, but the capacity to decide what matters and to practice the competence that makes those decisions stick.
Gluesenkamp Perez’s agenda centers on three pillars—each modest on paper, but potentially radical in effect. The first is the right to repair, which seeks to ensure consumers can access information, tools, and parts to repair products like cars, as opposed to being dependent on the manufacturer, which has increasingly become the case as more technical systems have become computerized. In championing bipartisan legislation that protects the right to repair, she has sought to return control to consumers and push back against planned obsolescence.
A second and related plank is trade education, which she is advancing through new funding proposals for shop classes and apprenticeships, rebuilding a pathway to middle-class dignity rooted in skill, not debt. Third and finally, Gluesenkamp Perez has championed antitrust. She has been outspoken in calling out the role of monopoly power in gutting local economies.
Some on the progressive left have kept Gluesenkamp Perez at arm’s length because she won’t perform politics as moral theater. Liberal voters in the more urban part of her district protested her recent town hall, furious over her vote for the SAVE Act (which would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote) and for her support for censuring Representative Al Green for disrupting a Trump speech. Much like the centrists at WelcomeFest, these critics have lost their bearings. The center clings to data dashboards and messaging strategy. The left often defaults to demands for agreement and threats of denunciation. Neither is equipped to ask the more pressing question: What kind of politics would it take to restore the material and moral foundations of democratic life?
Gluesenkamp Perez doesn’t offer a direct answer to that question. But the way she talks about work, ownership, obligation, and time gestures toward a different starting point—one rooted in her community’s particular needs, rather than any comprehensive ideology.
The question of how to make politics real again won’t be answered at WelcomeFest or on MSNBC panels. This is why the center keeps misreading Gluesenkamp Perez as one of its own, the progressive commentariat keeps her at a distance, and the press keeps filing stories about her under labels that are increasingly irrelevant. Every time she talks about work, ownership, or stolen time, she exposes the hollowness of the stage they’re still performing on.
Gluesenkamp Perez isn’t a strategy memo for Democrats or a fresh marketing lane for moderates. She’s a reminder that millions have already moved on without waiting for permission from the old order. The longer the parties pretend otherwise, the more obvious their irrelevance will become.