WASHINGTON — Joe Kent, a far-right Republican and former Army Special Forces officer, ran for Congress two years ago as a partisan warrior. He denied that President Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, supported rioters charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress and favored banning abortions nationwide.
He lost.
Now Kent is approaching a rematch against the Democrat who vanquished him in a competitive district in southern Washington, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, with a starkly different tone, emphasizing local issues and his personal story.
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“My campaign and I have talked with local leaders, past volunteers and activists to seek their advice,” Kent said in a campaign video, in which he talked about what he learned during his first campaign and is doing differently this time. “I’m expanding my campaign’s focus to local challenges,” he adds, as well as doing “more outreach to a broader base of voters.”
His is just one of more than a dozen congressional races this year, some of them in critical battlegrounds, that will offer voters the same choices they had in 2022, featuring both Republican and Democratic challengers seeking to unseat an incumbent they’ve already faced and lost to at least once before.
These near miss contenders are returning to the campaign trail with heightened name recognition, established fundraising networks, battle-tested campaign apparatuses and lessons learned from their failed bids that they hope will help them win this time. Their success or failure will help determine who wins control of the closely divided House in November.
In California, Rep. John Duarte bested his Democratic challenger, Adam Gray, by just a few hundred votes two years ago in one of the closest House races in the nation. The victory was a key pickup for Republicans that helped them take power in the House. This year, Democrats are aggressively targeting the seat once again.
Like other rematch challengers, Gray is working to turn incumbency in Congress into a blemish rather than an asset, seeking to tie Duarte, who has labored to separate himself from the Republican brand, to extremists in his party.
“There’s a reason you haven’t seen much of John Duarte,” Gray said in a video at the start of his campaign. “Because he went to Washington, and it didn’t take him long to become part of the problem.”
He went on to accuse Duarte of voting to cut Social Security and Medicare — although the congressman did not do so — and “to restrict a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions.”
That is an apparent reference to Duarte’s vote last year in support of an agriculture spending bill that included restrictions on an abortion pill; the measure ultimately failed. He also voted for a defense bill that would have restricted access to abortions in the military, a provision that was later dropped and that Duarte had opposed adding to the legislation, one of only two House Republicans to do so.
In Connecticut, George Logan, a Republican former state senator, pitches himself as the candidate of compromise and uses social media to offer a contrasting view to his Democratic opponent, Rep. Jahana Hayes, whom he has branded “the most partisan member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation.” Hayes often points to her ability to work across the aisle and help secure legislative victories, including funding for veterans, during both the Trump and Biden administrations.
And in a Texas district on the southern border, former Rep. Mayra Flores, a Donald Trump-endorsed far-right Republican who served about six months in office after a 2022 special election, has sought to harness voter concern over immigration. She used the occasion of Biden’s February visit to the area in an attack against her opponent’s policies.
“No amount of campaigning can fix the disaster they have created,” Flores said of Rep. Vicente Gonzalez Jr., a Democrat who unseated her in 2022. “Only electing new leadership in November can.”
Congressional rematches have had mixed results in recent years. In 2022, only one repeat challenger prevailed, when Republican Tom Kean Jr. defeated Rep. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat in northern New Jersey, on his second try. In 2020, three Republican challengers prevailed in rematches: Reps. Young Kim of California, Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida and Yvette Herrell of New Mexico.
But Herrell lost after just one term and now finds herself hoping the tables will turn yet again in her favor in November, when she faces Rep. Gabriel Vasquez, the Democrat who defeated her in 2022.
On the Democratic side, national campaign groups see a handful of rematches as critical to their push to win control of the House. They argue that their candidates will do better in a year when a presidential election will enhance turnout, especially after voters have been exasperated at a congressional session that has been marked by dysfunction and historically low levels of productivity.
“There is an overwhelming sense of buyer’s remorse among voters who’ve seen House Republicans fail spectacularly to lower costs or address pocketbook issues,” said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., who is chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, also expressed confidence about his party’s chances in key rematch races, including Kent’s. He said that the party’s House campaign arm would be “working closely with Joe to make sure southwest Washington voters know about his inspiring life story,” and that he was “confident they will elect him” this time.
While first-year incumbents typically prove easier to pick off, some Democrats are setting their sights on more tenured Republicans.
Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Republicans who represent swing districts that Biden won in 2020, will again face Democratic challengers, Tony Vargas in Nebraska and Ashley Ehasz in Pennsylvania.
Bacon has a successful track record of defeating repeat challengers, having beaten Kara Eastman, a Democrat, in 2018 and 2020, improving his margins the second time around.
Rep. Ken Calvert, a Republican who has served in Congress for three decades and almost never had a tough reelection contest until last cycle, will again face Will Rollins, the Democratic former federal prosecutor who challenged him in 2022. Rollins, who is openly gay, is hoping this will be the year he can capitalize on the redrawn boundaries of the Southern California district — which added the liberal bastion of Palm Springs, which residents claim as the gayest city in America — to oust the long-serving and staunchly conservative incumbent.
Some candidates in rematch races said they had been encouraged to take another chance after hearing from supporters who were energized by how close they came to winning.
Kirsten Engel, a Democratic former state senator who ran for an open seat in Arizona in 2022, lost by fewer than 6,000 votes to Juan Ciscomani, a Republican whom she is challenging again.
“You know, voters, supporters and people across the country were like, ‘Damn, that was really close,’” she said in an interview, referring to her loss two years ago. “Just 5,232 votes — but who’s counting.”
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