Thursday, August 15, 2024

POLITICO Nightly: Blue Dogs aim to grow their ranks


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By Natalie Fertig

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) smiles after a news conference on Aug. 8 in Portland, Ore.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) smiles after a news conference on Aug. 8 in Portland, Ore. | Jenny Kane/AP

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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What'd I Miss?

— Trump’s attempt to remove judge from hush money case fails again: The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal case today denied the former president’s latest bid to have the judge remove himself from the case , writing that Trump’s argument consisted of “nothing more than a repetition of stale and unsubstantiated claims.” Justice Juan Merchan’s decision means that he will remain on the case through Trump’s sentencing, which is set to take place Sept. 18, for his conviction over falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star.

— Google confirms Iran-linked hackers targeted Trump, Biden campaigns: An Iranian government-linked hacking group has targeted officials on the campaigns of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump , and attacks are ongoing against campaign officials, Google’s cybersecurity arm announced today. The report — put out days after the Trump campaign confirmed to POLITICO that it had been hacked — does not say if the hackers were behind the specific hacked and leaked documents that POLITICO reported on.

— Germany zeroes in on Ukrainian suspect in Nord Stream pipeline explosions: The man accused of being behind the most serious attack on Germany’s energy supplies since World War II can be seen on Facebook standing by the sea and smiling at the camera. A German warrant was issued in June for the involvement of Vladimir Zhuravlev , a Ukrainian diving instructor, in the Sept. 26, 2022 attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, according to a report in German news program Tagesschau today.

Nightly Road to 2024

Donald Trump arrives to speak to reporters.

Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. | Alex Brandon/AP

NOT MAKING BOTH SIDES HAPPY — Donald Trump still doesn’t have an answer on how he’ll vote on an abortion measure in his home state . And it’s about to become a lot harder for him to avoid it, writes POLITICO. Four months ago, Trump announced he favored leaving the issue of abortion to the states. Now, state-level referendums on the lightning-rod issue are making ballots across the country — including, on Monday, in the battleground state of Arizona, and on Tuesday in Missouri.

And in Florida, where Trump is a registered voter, the former president has yet to say how he’ll cast his own vote on the measure known as Amendment 4, which would abolish the state’s newly-enacted ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The looming referendum is threatening Trump’s efforts, as he put it in April, to “make both sides happy” with his position, and it’s giving Democrats an opening to continue hammering him.

THE CROWDED ARIZONA BALLOT — The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that a proposal that would let local police make arrests near the state’s border with Mexico will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot for voters to decide , reports the Associated Press. That sets up the biggest push to draw local authorities into immigration enforcement since the state’s landmark 2010 law that required police to question people’s immigration status in certain situations.

The court late Tuesday afternoon rejected a challenge from Latino groups that argued the ballot measure had violated a rule in the state constitution that says legislative proposals must cover a single subject. If approved by voters, the proposal, known as Proposition 314, would make it a state crime for people to cross the Arizona-Mexico border anywhere except a port of entry, give state and local law enforcement officers the power to arrest violators and let state judges order people to return to their home countries.

OUTSOURCING THE CAMPAIGN — The Republican campaign for president is quietly being remade by new federal guidelines that empower big-money groups and threaten to undermine party control well beyond the 2024 election, reports the New York Times. Former President Donald J. Trump’s team has enlisted some of these groups to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors across the country — saving the campaign significant money in the process. But the Trump campaign is making a serious gamble in doing so, betting that these outside groups, which they do not directly control, can carry out their marching orders without accountability.

GHOSTS OF 2020 — Kamala Harris may be done with Medicare for All, but Medicare for All – with a new nudge from former President Donald Trump – isn’t done with her, writes CNN. The Trump campaign today attacked Harris over her past support for a move to the single-payer, government-run health care system long championed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Medicare for All gained broad support among progressive Democrats, especially those with eyes on the White House, before and during the early stages of the party’s 2020 presidential primary. Harris’ team said recently that she no longer backs the plan, which fell out of vogue with Democrats as Joe Biden surged to the nomination four years ago as one of the few candidates to vocally oppose it.

AROUND THE WORLD

GOING GLOBAL — The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a new global health emergency as Africa grapples with a fast-spreading and deadly outbreak of mpox.

The virus has been detected for the first time in numerous countries in Africa and is disproportionately affecting children. It has killed at least 517 people with more than 17,000 suspected cases across Africa so far this year, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The detection and rapid spread of a new clade of mpox in eastern DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press briefing this evening.

Cases have surged since 2022, when the WHO last declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern. More recently, an alarming new variant that first appeared in 2023 has spread within the DRC and to neighboring regions, now recorded in at least five countries.

NIGHT MOVES — Kyiv’s forces continued their incursion into Russian territory overnight, targeting airbases , sending a barrage of missiles and drones into the Kursk region and triggering a state of emergency in the entire Belgorod region.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement this morning that dozens of Ukrainian drones were shot down across the southwest of the country over the regions of Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, Volgograd, Bryansk, Orel, Rostov and Nizhny Novgorod.

Ukraine appeared to be targeting Russia’s airbases. The Nizhny Novgorod region is home to Savasleyka airbase, where Moscow’s forces house aircraft equipped with the hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. According to local and Ukrainian media reports, multiple drones hit the airbase. The Astra independent news site reported that the Borisoglebsk aviation center in the Voronezh region had been hit, noting that pro-war military bloggers said at least three Russian airbases were targeted overnight. Last week, Ukraine said it hit Russia’s Lipetsk airbase.

 

A YEAR OF CALIFORNIA CLIMATEA year ago, the California Climate newsletter was created with a goal in mind — to be your go-to source for cutting-edge climate policy reporting in the Golden State. From covering Gov. Newsom's crucial China trip to leading the coverage on California's efforts to Trump-proof its climate policies, we've been at the forefront of the climate conversation. Join us for year two if you haven’t already, subscribe now.

 
 
Nightly Number

2.9 percent

The annual rate at which prices in the United States climbed in July , the Federal Reserve announced today, inching closer to the Fed’s 2 percent target.

RADAR SWEEP

CONTENT CRUNCH — In the midst of a barrage of lawsuits against AI companies for copyright infringement, big record companies made a fairly straightforward claim — that AI companies’ synthetic music generation is “saturat[ing] the market” and “cheapen[ing] … the genuine sound recordings.” The strange thing is what happened next — the defendant AI companies accepted the assessment that their content is deeply similar . The bold move is part of a broader legal strategy: Cast the deep-pocketed record companies as the aggressors and the AI companies as startups trying to break into the industry. Plus, given that re-releases of similar material is generally not challenged in the same way (see: Taylor Swift), the idea that similar content represents copyright infringement might not play. Eriq Gardner reports on the state of play for Puck.

Parting Image

On this date in 1982: Mother Teresa carries one of 37 children who arrived in East Beirut, Lebanon. The children were in a hospital in the Sabra area of West Beirut when it was destroyed by Israeli forces in the midst of the Lebanon War.

On this date in 1982: Mother Teresa carries one of 37 children who arrived in East Beirut, Lebanon. The children were in a hospital in the Sabra area of West Beirut when it was destroyed by Israeli forces in the midst of the Lebanon War. | Alexis Duclos/AP

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