SOUTH BEND — Finding themselves back in the political wilderness, Democrats descended upon the coast earlier this month for a tradition that’s stood the test of time: The Pacific County Crab Feed.

Hosted by the Democrats of Pacific County since the 1920s, the 97th annual crab feed held March 15 at the Willapa Harbor Community Center was not a time for celebration. For just the 15th year since the event began, the party is locked completely out of power in the other Washington, holding neither the presidency or either chamber of Congress.

But while the current national outlook is gloomy for the party, an overflow of fresh crab and conversation seemed to keep spirits high throughout the evening. Jordan Manchester, the county party chair, said there were concerns early on about attendance — revenue from the tickets sold for the crab feed are a major source of annual funding for the group — given that 2025 is an off-year with no statewide or federal elections, but a surge of ticket sales in the days leading up to the event secured another sell-out.

The list of guest speakers was also strong, headlined by Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson and U.S. Rep Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Ferguson is the first sitting governor to attend the crab feed since Gov. Christine Gregoire’s final appearance in 2010, and Gluesenkamp Perez defied national trends to win re-election in a district that President Donald Trump carried by three points.

Other guest speakers at the event included Lt. Gov. Denny Heck, State Treasurer Mike Pellicciotti, state party chair Shasti Conrad, Long Beach Mayor Sue Svendsen, Chinook Indian Nation Chair Tony Johnson, Pacific County Immigrant Support Treasurer Erika Hersey, Whole Washington Board Chair Carey Wallace, and Heather Kurtenbach, Executive Secretary of the Washington State Building and Construction Trades Council.

Ilwaco Mayor Mike Cassinelli was awarded the 2024 Democrat of the Year award, which is voted on by previous honorees. Manchester said the group relies on Cassinelli, a former county party chair himself, “to explain all the complexities of maritime politics and history in the region” and called him one of his personal mentors.

‘Something worth having’

Just four months after watching Democrats fall just a few seats shy of winning back control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Gluesenkamp Perez is pushing her party to offer new solutions to fight back against what she called the “extreme agenda” that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have rolled out the past few months.

For too long, she said, the culture and partisanship of Washington D.C. has been inserted into the lives of rural Americans rather than the other way around.

“It is not just about resistance, it is about replacing that [agenda] with something worth having,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “We’ve proved that a Democrat can win here — not by watering down our values but by focusing on the issues that actually matter to working people.”

In order for Democrats to compete and win in districts like the one she represents — the impact of gerrymandering aside — Gluesenkamp Perez said the party needs to “build a voice for ordinary people in this country.”

“The idea that our country is too divided for commonsense voices to break through? I reject that. We win by showing up and by listening, and delivering real results, fighting for good jobs, lowering the cost of living, and [having] a government that actually works for working people and not just a donor class,” she said.

While Gluesenkamp Perez was critical of Elon Musk and his leading of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (“Doggy,” she mockingly pronounced it), calling the administration’s methods illegal, unethical, cruel and ineffective, the congresswoman said it doesn’t mean that problems with how government is run don’t exist.

“We all have gotten these terrible migraines from operating under this kind of bureaucracy, where we don’t have agency to do the thing we’re trying to do, whether that means we’re not able to build housing for veterans, or we’re not able to pass on the family business to the next generation,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “All of these things that pile on and make us feel powerless in this system, those are real.

“But you don’t fix those things by scapegoating civil servants. That is the world’s cheapest, most obnoxious form of ‘fixing’ the system. It’s not going to make things better, we all see that. You don’t fix the machine by just hacking its legs out from under it. Legislators need to take agency, they need to take action, to reform the machine itself and build a better machine. That is the point.”

Positive policy agenda

While Gluesenkamp Perez said Republicans have done a good job of echoing and amplifying the resentment in local communities, the solutions they’re providing are “completely corrosive to the end-goal itself.” She said the Democrats have to do the longer work of fixing the system the right way, but noted they currently hold none of the levers of the federal government.

“We cannot just resort to a reflexive resistance. We cannot just be defenders of the status quo,” the congresswoman said. “We have to maintain a positive policy agenda. You cannot just gaslight Americans and say ‘Look, crime’s really not that bad,’ or ‘The economy’s really not that bad because it says so in my spreadsheet, let me tell you why your lived experience is wrong.’”

Democrats have an “incredible strategic opportunity” to point to the flaws in the system because Republicans have not done the work to provide actual solutions, Gluesenkamp Perez added. She mentioned legislation she co-sponsored this year as one such example, which would better ensure that corporate polluters of PFAS, commonly known as cancer-causing “forever chemicals,” would be liable for cleanup efforts and not taxpayer-funded public water utilities.

“It’s not just a pocket-book issue. This is about having agency in the middle class. This is about having stewardship of our public resources. It’s about being able to fix your boat so you don’t sell the business your grandfather started,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a small thing. I don’t think having clean drinking water is a small thing.

“And talking about these issues, forcing those in power to confront the fact that these problems are not being solved, that is how we take the air out of Elon Musk’s tires — by fixing the problem itself, by providing the real policy solutions to the issues that we all see around us.”

Instead of focusing on the “flurry” of executive orders coming everyday from the White House — or Twitter, Gluesenkamp Perez said, a reference to Musk’s influence in the executive branch — she again referred to a “positive policy agenda” that the Democrats must adopt and run on.

She also said there’s a liability to making Musk the guy who’s holding the bag, saying it’s “entirely probable” the billionaire is just a fall guy that Trump and Congressional Republicans will eventually distance themselves from.

“We have got to hold the elected officials who are empowering him accountable for that and not allow Musk to become the centerpiece of any kind of agenda or policy program,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “I do not want to see us led around the nose. That is how they divide us. That is how they balkanize our party into endless infighting instead of allowing us to focus on what is really useful, what is ultimately desirable and worth having.”

Taking on Trump, again

Fourteen years after first attending the event in 2011, when he was still a King County councilor and candidate for state attorney general, Ferguson returned to the crab feed this year as Washington’s new governor. Earlier that day, he held court at the Willapa Center in Raymond with about two dozen local officials and community leaders to discuss issues facing the state and area.

During his speech to crab feed attendees, Ferguson vowed that the state would take on the Trump administration like it did the first time around. The governor recalled that Washington was the first state to take the Trump administration to court in 2017 over the Muslim travel ban, when Ferguson was attorney general.

“It’s hard to imagine it can be worse than the first time we had to deal with this administration, but guess what: I think it is,” Ferguson said.

At last year’s crab feed, Ferguson said if he was elected governor and Trump was re-elected president that fall, “I will be there for you as a governor to defend your rights and uphold our constitution and defend our democracy.” During that final year as attorney general, he added that he told his office to gear up for a potential Trump administration.

“We were not going to wait around in case he got elected. The team in the AG’s office, they went through Project 2025 line-by-line,” Ferguson said, noting Washington was the first state to challenge the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship in court. “A key reason is that we were prepared.”

A federal judge in Washington called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional” and halted its implementation, a decision that was upheld by an appeals court. The administration is now asking the Supreme Court to allow restrictions to partly take effect while legal fights continue to play out.

As Washington continues to challenge the administration’s actions relating to mass firings of federal workers and budget cuts, Ferguson called on attendees to take action of their own and make their voices heard by attending rallies, writing letters and making phone calls. To applause, he predicted Democrats would regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections.

“There is no governor who is better prepared to take this guy on than me,” Ferguson said. “I’ve got the experience to do it, we’ve done it before, we’re gonna do it for the next four years if that’s what’s required. We’re gonna do it together.”