Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s local run-into-your-neighbor meeting place is a dump. Literally.
“Our kind of community center where I live is actually the dump, because we don’t have trash service. So that’s where you see your neighbors that you don’t live near,” the Washington Democrat told HuffPost in an interview.
“To be considered there to be hardworking and honest and loyal,” she said — “that’s what matters to me.”
Stemming from that approach, Gluesenkamp Perez’s message to her fellow Democrats quietly reeling from the Nov. 5 election losses is pretty simple: be humble, be authentic and be willing to listen.
As Democrats sift through the wreckage of their losses, some of which were very close (a House with another historically narrow margin) and some of which were not close at all (Donald Trump’s electoral vote total), they are looking for answers.
And the Blue Dogs, a group of moderate House Democrats who have diminished in number so much since their heyday under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama they’re often the butt of jokes about going extinct, have ideas.
“There is very clear evidence that running, being a Blue Dog, voting like a Blue Dog, is a structural advantage in holding these seats,” Gluesenkamp Perez.
The group sprang to life in the 1990s, in reaction to budget deficit and national security concerns that members felt weren’t being taken seriously enough by the left flank of the party. They carved out a niche as anti-deficit, socially moderate members who most famously tried to keep the cost of Obamacare down but were almost wiped out in the Tea Party wave of 2010 anyway.
Two of the Blue Dogs’ co-chairs, Gluesenkamp Perez and Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), won in districts carried by Trump in 2020 and the third, Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska), barely lost her race in a Trump district. She was the only one of the 10-member caucus to be defeated; the group lost one other member this cycle when Rep. Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.) opted not to run again.
Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.), a Blue Dog who represents California’s San Joaquin Valley, said the party has too often overlooked areas like his rural, agriculture-heavy district.
“There has not been the sort of nurturing and attention to understand the needs of rural America,” he told HuffPost.
“I mean, I do that. That’s my district. But I think there’s a lot of parts of rural America that think the Democratic Party is a bicoastal party. And we need to do better.”
Eric Koch, a Democratic consultant to several Blue Dog candidates, said the key was remaining locally-focused, pointing to the wins the group notched in Washington and Maine against very different GOP candidates.
“The common thread in both wins was a relentless focus on local messaging that cut through the national noise while showing how they tangibly delivered for their districts in real, meaningful ways,” he said.
Gluesenkamp Perez said voters want to know their concerns are actually being heard and understood by lawmakers.
“They want to know that they’re respected and listened to, with humility and curiosity and credence,” she said.
That also means not trying to talk them out of what they are experiencing. Democrats, including Harris, frequently pointed to data from the Labor Department that showed inflation had slowed sharply from a four-decade high in 2022 and noted, correctly, that it was mostly caused by pandemic aftereffects and the war in Ukraine. But many voters didn’t buy it.
“There is not a spreadsheet on earth that is going to talk people out of the experience of taking shit out of their grocery cart because they can’t afford it,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “So ‘don’t do that’ is the answer.”
Gluesenkamp Perez also partially endorsed a criticism by retiring Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), a non-Blue Dog who represents the Minneapolis suburbs. Phillip said Democrats appeared ideologically rigid, especially on what he called “wokeness.”
Even if that’s not quite how Gluesenkamp Perez described it — “The fundamental problem here is not a ‘woke/not woke’ mentality,” she said — the fight over whether the party in general is too progressive on social issues is unlikely to go away soon.
The GOP campaigned heavily on Democrats’ support of transgender people, for example, leaving Democrats to decide whether to possibly risk political capital in sticking up for a small if vulnerable minority group.
(The actual importance to 2024 voters of transgender rights is unclear. An October Gallup survey found only 38% of voters said trans rights were important to their vote, compared to 52% who saw the economy that way. On the other hand, the Trump campaign felt confident enough in the issue it aired TV ads linking Harris with transgender rights over 30,000 times by mid-October.)
“I would ask that [Democrats] give some thought to the fact that we share values and principles, but I think we better understand what it takes to win the districts necessary to win majorities,” Phillips told HuffPost Tuesday.
“There’s been a lot of pressure to be uniform,” said Gluesenkamp Perez. “I think it’s a self-inflicted wound to demand unanimity when the world is not uniform, our districts are not the same.”
But she also dismissed the idea of an inherent conflict between groups like the Blue Dogs and the much larger and more liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus, at least over cultural issues.
Democracy In The Balance
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“That’s not what we’re talking about here. We are talking about the diverse values and priorities of our community, not demonizing anybody,” she said.
She said greater diversity in candidates would also help Democrats. While, as an auto repair shop owner, she was new to lawmaking, Gluesenkamp Perez said she got the second-highest number of bill amendments passed among her fellow Democratic congressional freshmen since she was sworn in last year, and her office was known for fast work helping constituents. Congress needs more outsiders, she said, rather than statehouse veterans and members of the professional class.
Often, though, she said Democrats need to acknowledge people have “a very good bullshit meter” and be more authentic, instead of trying to paper over or obscure their stances.
“Literally every time somebody hosted a coffee gathering for me, they felt compelled to say, ‘Now, I don’t agree with Marie on everything uniformly,’” she said. “And that’s great. Like, we are different people.”
“We’re interested in finding the best fit for the district who shares the highest level of, the most shared values. Not every [value], but the most.”