In one of Washington’s so-called jungle primaries, in which the top-two vote getters win regardless of party, McMorris Rodgers drew slightly more than 49 percent of the vote, with Brown less than four points behind her. A “Trump populist” and two other Republicans took 5 percent between them. “The barometer I use is when an incumbent is below 50, they’ve got a problem,” says Ron Dotzauer, a veteran Democratic consultant based in Washington with a penchant for boss-of-the-plains hats.

And McMorris Rodgers’s campaign seems to realize there are warning signs. Todd Cranney, a consultant working with the congresswoman’s campaign, believes she is likely to win, but acknowledged that the race is more competitive than any McMorris Rodgers has faced in the recent past.

The election in the fall will be competitive in part because Democrats frequently do several points better in general elections than in primaries, said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Kondik rates the district as “lean Republican,” consistent with other prognosticators. FiveThirtyEight’s recently released House forecast gives McMorris Rodgers a five-in-seven chance of victory. The Cook Political Report considers the district eight points more Republican on average than the nation as a whole. But the seat is unlikely to tip the balance of the House. Democrats need to gain 24 seats to take the chamber; if Washington’s Fifth falls, the party is likely to do substantially better than that, perhaps taking 35 or 40 House seats on the night, and maybe more.

The Fifth District hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1992. McMorris Rodgers has never scored less than 56 percent of the vote, and often racks up wins in the mid-60s. President Trump won the district in 2016 by 13 percent. Both Brown and McMorris Rodgers came up through Washington’s state legislature. Brown spent 20 years in both houses; McMorris Rodgers more than a decade as a state representative. McMorris Rodgers took the Fifth District in the 2004 election and rose quickly through the Republican ranks in the House, becoming the vice chair of the Republican Conference in four years and the chair in another four after that.

Likely the most powerful elected female Republican in the country and the only one of 23 Republican women in the House in a senior-leadership role, McMorris Rodgers is no stranger to the spotlight. She’s constructed a carefully crafted public image in her decades in politics, one that plays up her role as a mother and plays down partisan politics, says the Gonzaga University political-science professor Cynthia Stavrianos. Profiles in national media often emphasize that she was appointed to the state legislature, pointing to a role as an almost accidental politician. To State Senator Michael Baumgartner, she’s “the farm girl from Kettle Falls.”