With help from Brakkton Booker, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz

Hi there, Recast family!

We’re publishing our second annual Power List on Friday, featuring 40 movers and shakers on politics, culture and identity in 2022. (You can check out last year’s list here). In the meantime, we’re giving you a taste of some of the folks you’ll find featured on our list.

So let’s talk about the first Republican woman to represent Oregon in Congress. She’s also one of just two Latinas to have ever represented that state in Congress.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer flipped the state’s 5th district, a longtime Democratic seat, in the November midterms. She won by a 2 percent margin, narrowly beating progressive Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner and was bolstered, in part, by national Republicans pouring millions of out-of-state dollars into the race.

In an August 2022 interview, Chavez-DeRemer told POLITICO that her ability to connect with Hispanic voters was an asset. The Latino population in Oregon, while small, is growing rapidly. She will be essential to the Republican Party’s strategy to win over Latino voters, harnessing a slow-but-steady shift to conservatism among this demographic.

“That balance of a woman, of a Hispanic woman, of a conservative, a business owner, a mayor, a mom, all those seem to be where the party was headed under this tent of diversity,” Chavez-DeRemer said in August.

The lawmaker visited our POLITICO headquarters for a photoshoot and an interview and here’s a snippet of our recent conversation, edited for clarity and length.

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THE RECAST: What was your first job? And what is the life lesson that you took away from it?

CHAVEZ-DEREMER: My first job was packing peaches in Hanford, California. Long days, long hours.

I was a junior in high school, I wanted to be a cheerleader. And my parents said they couldn’t afford the uniform. It was expensive, I remember, at that time. And they said, “Go get a job.” So my girlfriend and I took that first job packing peaches.

After the first day, she took her bag and she went home and she said, “I’m never doing this again.” And she went and got a job as a cashier. And I stayed on for the summer and finished off the job.

I worked 16-hour days and I knew that it was a family business. So I just knew that the rest of my life would be based on, if I wanted something, I needed to work hard.

THE RECAST: Can you talk about some of the challenges you’ve had in the past year, especially activating voters in your district?

CHAVEZ-DEREMER: You have to invest in your community early. I took that message on the campaign, that I was committed to my community, committed to my family, committed to their families.

I think at one point, somebody said that the campaign was kind of stacked in my favor. I said, “It was stacked in my favor in certain areas because I had already put in 22 years on the ground.”

THE RECAST: What are going to be your priorities for the 118th Congress?

CHAVEZ-DEREMER: Working across the aisle. I mean, this particular seat, you know, is an even district. I often said if something was won 51-49 or 52-48, that meant 48 percent of the population still didn’t think it was possibly a good idea.

My goal was to make that consensus even better. So working with my colleagues in Oregon, working with my freshman colleagues here to have maybe some new legislation on transportation and infrastructure.

And Oregon is having a tremendous amount of angst with crime and homelessness and the fentanyl addiction. So I want to make sure as a mom, as a business owner and as a former mayor, that we stay focused on those priorities.

THE RECAST: Will your priorities be made difficult by the fact that we’re in a divided Congress?

CHAVEZ-DEREMER: I think it’s actually a positive thing to have a divided Congress because it forces you to have the discussions. Sometimes when it’s weighted to one party or the other, the other side is left out of the discussion.

It’s going to force us to have the talks that maybe are hard to have. But I’m willing to put everything on the table for Oregon — and for America.