ENDANGERED SPECIES — No Democrats voted more out of step with President Joe Biden in 2023 than Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.). They’ve received heavy criticism from liberal and progressive circles for not always backing party priorities, but instead of running for the hills, they’re digging in — and hoping to expand their populist ranks. Tuesday night brought a measure of success, when Rebecca Cooke, a waitress and small business owner raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm, beat out two other Democrats in western Wisconsin’s 3rd District. Cooke has an uphill battle against freshman Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden in her Republican-leaning district in November. But if she wins, she plans to join the Blue Dog Coalition currently co-chaired by Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez. The group, currently a cadre of 11 House Democrats who regularly break with President Joe Biden and work across the aisle on bipartisan legislation, has been forced to reshape itself again and again over the years like the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Once numbering over 40, the group was decimated in the 2010 election and has since drifted ideologically from pro-corporation centrists to pro-worker populists. Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez are aiming to expand the Blue Dog numbers in 2024, and the Blue Dogs PAC has spent $1.45 million backing a handful of Democratic primary candidates in swing districts from Palm Springs to the Des Moines suburbs as part of that effort. Many of the Democratic lawmakers who broke most with Biden in 2023 are Blue Dogs: Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez are the first and second most likely to vote against Biden, according to data analyzed by Five Thirty Eight, while Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) are third, sixth and tenth, respectively. Their willingness to break with their party has also made them valuable negotiators. Earlier this year, for example, Golden, Gluesenkamp Perez and fellow Blue Dog Jim Costa (D-Calif.) were part of a bipartisan coalition that crafted a deal to provide funding for Ukraine and Israel and secure the southern border. Cooke wants to join this club. Raised in a bipartisan household, she understands both parties — but chose to run as a Democrat because of a number of issues, including reproductive rights and the GOP’s immovability on widely supported policies like universal background checks. She’s already building a tight relationship with Gluesenkamp Perez, who picked her up from the airport when she visited D.C. in the spring. “I was motivated to step up for working families like mine that had to make that really tough choice to put away and to shutter a 150-year-old [farm] tradition, ” Cooke told POLITICO on a phone call in July, “and that’s the story of a lot of people.” She’s betting that staking out moderate positions can help her pull an upset in November by winning so-called pivot counties, places that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Donald Trump in 2016. Wisconsin’s 3rd District includes a handful of these elusive places; of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., only about 200 fall in this category. They prefer Democrats of the populist variety: Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden both hail from districts with multiple pivot counties, as did Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz when he was in Congress. A populist Blue Dog as a House member, Walz backed gay marriage and gun rights while opposing the 2008 bank bailout supported by most Democrats. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Walz survived the Blue Dog massacre of 2010. Trump succeeded in areas like western Wisconsin, Cooke said, because people were looking for a change to the status quo. Brought up on a farm, she’s passionate about increasing the number of lawmakers in Congress who actually know something about agriculture and will speak more for family farmers than agricultural conglomerates. Wisconsin’s 3rd District ranks first in the state and 29th nationally for the total market value of agricultural products sold, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Ninety-six percent of the district’s farms are family-owned. “I’m excited about the House Blue Dogs coalition because they’re intent on recruiting a new class of lawmakers that have those kind of bonafides… [of] understanding their communities, of understanding industries and culture, that I think is really critically important to making laws,” said Cooke, who cites former Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone as an inspiration. “Who knows what a Holstein [cow] is in Congress, right?” There are echoes in Cooke’s approach to farm policy of the way Golden talks about the fishing industry, or MGP about forestry, in their largely rural districts. They’re all populists who argue that their district’s industries would benefit from addressing Democratic priorities like climate change, but that workers and small business owners in those industries should be brought into the discussion and listened to. The Democratic Party has been bleeding rural voters in recent years. But they’d have more success running in rural and working class districts if the Democratic Party changed their recruiting style, Cooke says. “A lot of recruitment is [about] how much money you can raise, [or] ‘what’s in your personal network’,” she said. “But it’s not about that out here, when you get to rural Wisconsin.” Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto shop owner, did not receive support from the party’s House campaign arm in her upset political victory in 2022. Through the Blue Dogs PAC, she’s making sure that won’t be the case for candidates like Cooke. “Candidates we’ve endorsed, I’ve had other members lobby against,” Gluesenkamp Perez told POLITICO about Cooke in April. “[They say] ‘she didn’t have a real job. She’s a waitress.’” To win, Cooke is going to have to overcome Trump’s popularity in rural America, which will boost her rival. The most recent New York Times/Siena College poll puts his lead over Kamala Harris at 57 percent to 40 percent among rural voters. To make up the difference against Trump’s popularity, the Cooke campaign is targeting overlooked voting blocs such as students at the district’s six colleges and universities, registering them as they show up for classes in the fall. She’s also targeting voters who “are going to zig and zag on their ballot.” Should Democrats scrape out a narrow House majority — a difficult feat that will likely require Blue Dogs to hold their current seats and Blue Dog PAC-backed candidates to flip a couple more — their working class caucus will have both a bigger footprint and a lot of pull in the next Congress. Golden, who is facing a very tough reelection race of his own, says the group plans to use its bargaining power in a narrow Democratic majority to push for working class issues. “I think we got to be out there pushing for the middle class tax cuts to be protected,” he said. “And that’s probably going to mean that we got to go after the upper end, like the wealthy folks.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at nfertig@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @natsfert.
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