The Blue Dog Bark

My reflections on a year of pack leadership

Dear Mainer,

In today’s Congress, there’s more need than ever for bold leadership in service of common sense and honest representation. The narrow majority means a premium will be placed on members who are willing to look across the aisle, not bunker down on their side of the Chamber with blind eyes and deaf ears to half their colleagues.

Bold leadership. Common sense. These are the taglines for the Blue Dog Coalition, which I’ve had the privilege to serve as Co-Chair for administration in 2024. But our purpose is more meaningful than any slogan.

As our small but mighty coalition looks forward to a new Congress, with new leaders chosen to lead the Blue Dogs in the House, I wanted to reflect on how I have worked — along with my co-chairs Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Mary Peltola — to give new life and new direction to this storied caucus.

Respect for our roots

The Blue Dogs were a legacy when I arrived in Congress. At one time, dozens of members filled their ranks, including one of my predecessors representing Maine’s 2nd District, Rep. Mike Michaud. The caucus had seen major wins and helped shape the debate in Congress for years, ensuring the values of fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense, and sound governance were represented at the table.

Blue Dogs helped draft successful campaign finance reform legislation and rules requiring that new spending be paid for. They advocated fiercely for balanced budgets, nonpartisan redistricting, and robust national security both abroad and at home.

Those values and victories are important to remember, and remain key to Blue Dogs today. But it’s also true that throughout most of its history, the Blue Dogs were a home primarily for southern Democrats who were conservative along mid- to late-20th century cultural fault lines. Many were pro-life and against marriage equality. As support for reproductive freedom and civil rights for all grew, not just among Democrats but all Americans, the stereotypical Blue Dog was increasingly marginalized.

By the time I joined the Blue Dogs, there were big questions about our future. What kind of space would we carve for ourselves in Congress? Who in our party’s broad tent were we trying to make room for?

Our new direction

To me, the answer couldn’t be about ideology — positioning the Blue Dogs as a foil to progressive or conservative caucuses in the House. There’s plenty of that in our Chamber already. And it wasn’t about regionalism, either. The idea that the Blue Dogs would be a home only for members from the South, or anywhere else, seemed like a relic of its history more than a vision of its future.

Yes, we would always stand for fiscal stability, national security, and good government. These are noncontroversial, commonsense values shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans. In my time in office, we’ve seen Republicans talk about fiscal responsibility while blowing up the deficit with tax cuts stacked in favor of the wealthy. And we’ve seen Democrats claim to care about public safety while abdicating responsibility over security at the Southern border.

I’m proud that Blue Dogs stood firm against both instances of political doublespeak and hypocrisy.

But my vision for the Blue Dogs — the vision my co-chairs and I ran on when we took over the Caucus — is about more than policy. It’s about a return to the roots of representational democracy: A commitment to place-based politics as an antidote to increasingly nationalized agendas on both sides of the aisle, in which a representative from an urban West Coast district with a service- and information-based economy and one from a rural, deindustrialized or agricultural Midwestern district were expected to carry water for the same policies, priorities, and political messages cooked up in Washington, D.C.

Hyperlocal leadership in Congress

To me, the question of what the Blue Dogs must be for has a simple answer: Our districts, independent of the whims and wishes of party leaders or the powerful economic, political, or cultural elites. Under the leadership of myself, Marie, and Mary, Blue Dogs have made clear that to run with our pack, you have to bring a localist view of what it means to serve in Congress. We put more stock in loyalty to constituents and country than loyalty to the party or even to our caucus.

Congress would be better if we had more members like that — members like Adam Gray, the newest Blue Dog in Congress, who recently won election in California’s Central Valley. Adam ran on his record of protecting water access for his constituents and supporting vocational education and agricultural job training programs in his community. That’s not the kind of platform that’s likely to get you fawning headlines in national partisan media, but it’s the kind of local, solutions-oriented focus on working-class issues that Americans crave. I’m excited to welcome Adam as a colleague in January.

Blue Dogs spend most of our time working quietly and relentlessly on behalf of our districts. We’re fighting for lobstermen in Maine, loggers in Washington state, and law enforcement officers on the Texas border. We have some of the best records in Congress of securing federal funds for our Districts, like the millions I’ve secured to rebuild aging waste- and drinking-water infrastructure in rural Maine.

But we’re also about standing up for our constituents when national political agendas run up against the interest of our district. This is not for the faint of heart. Blue Dogs take heat publicly and privately when they buck the party line or work across the aisle when it’s in the interest of our district. (Just look at how the progressive establishment and social media keyboard warriors reacted when just two of us voted against a poorly targeted, expensive student debt relief bill that would have seen most of our constituents pay off debts incurred by college graduates in other parts of the country.)

In this Congress, Blue Dogs have reliably been among the only Democratic votes to cross the partisan aisle. Our positions are mainstream across working-class America, even if here in Washington we get treated like we’re crazy.

Our pack grows stronger

Luckily, there’s a lot more to America than what passes for normal on Capitol Hill. And the Blue Dog pack is growing: Just this month, members of the DFL in the Minnesota State Senate formed their own Blue Dog Coalition.

As far as I know, it’s the first state-level Blue Dog organization. The most exciting thing about this development is that none of our members in Congress had anything to do with it. Just like us, it seems, the Minnesota Blue Dogs are an independent bunch who don’t ask for permission when they see a good idea on the table.

In the new Congress, the Blue Dogs will be co-chaired by Reps. Gluesenkamp Perez, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, and Lou Correa of California. I’m eager to keep working with them not only on behalf of our districts, but to keep making space for others like us in Congress. To that end, I’m taking on a new, more political role with the Blue Dogs, and I’m excited to keep working to bring this storied caucus into the 21st century.

For our district and our families,