As the Democratic Party reckons with a sharp rightward shift in the electorate, a nonprofit group aligned with the House’s moderate Blue Dog Coalition of Democrats is launching a new biweekly podcast to promote a more centrist vision of Democratic policies.
The first installment of the show, titled Blue Dog Radio, will be a three-part series featuring a conversation between Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, who serve as co-chairs of the Congressional Blue Dog Coalition. The show is hosted and produced by the Blue Dog Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group founded and run by Golden’s former chief of staff, Aisha Woodward and Phil Gardner, Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign manager on her 2022 campaign.
The podcast, a narrator says in the introduction, will “cut through the noise and talk about what really matters to Americans in every corner of this country. This show is about common sense, community and making politics work the way it’s supposed to, for real people in real places.”
The first episode, set to be released Monday, is titled “What It Really Means to Represent Home” and will “explore the connections they each have with the communities they represent and lay the foundation for what it truly means to serve all Americans.”
“This show, we’re going to be talking about our ideas about politics and what it means to represent people,” Golden says in the episode. “And I think that is really important for people that are listening, and understand that it’s at the heart of what we do and what we believe we’re here for.”
Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez are two of the most centrist and vulnerable Democrats in the House Democratic Caucus. Both often buck party leadership to vote. The membership of the Blue Dogs has significantly shrunk over the past decade, due to both partisan gerrymandering making districts more conservative (resulting in members losing to Republicans) and a steep progressive shift in the Democratic Party (resulting in members losing their primaries to more liberal opponents). In 2008 there were 65 members who identified as Blue Dogs. Today, there are only 10.
On the show, Gluesenkamp Perez says, “Some of these bills we see, it’s like, well, shit makes good reading, but it’s totally divorced from our experience in southwest Washington,” which leaves them having to decide whether to vote for their constituents or how leadership wants them to vote.
“What we’re talking about here is, what does it feel like to break with the party,” Golden said. “When you break with the party, sometimes it’s not just some leader, you know, Speaker Pelosi is going to break your arm or something. It’s like this group pressure. When I’ve taken big stances against the party, you saw that almost like people were treating me like I had leprosy or something, and they’ll isolate you and come at you.”
Golden added that, because they face pressure from their party, it’s important to know “why you’re here, it’s that loyalty to your constituents, you can withstand all of that if you got that strong connection.”
Episodes two and three — titled “Back to the Land” and “Faith and the Common Good” — will continue this conversation between Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez and will be released in the coming weeks.