Democrats should try harder to win tough races

What we can learn from political outliers and the legislative story of their electoral success

Liam Kerr is co-founder of WelcomePAC, which supports candidates who win the middle to strengthen a coherent, welcoming faction of the Democratic Party that protects democracy and governs effectively. He writes the WelcomeStack newsletter.

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When you hear “Blue Dog,” the progressive left wants you to think of a bloated old white guy stuffing his face with lobbyist appetizers. But while that archetype may fit into the DC happy hour scene, the new Blue Dogs stand out — both in how they vote, and in who votes for them.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Mary Peltola, and Jared Golden are outliers. A quick Google Image search reveals they do not fit the caricature of a pot bellied old white guy either: Jared Golden is a sinewy, tattooed millennial, typically sans suit, who grew up in rural Maine and left college after 9/11 to enlist in the Marine infantry, deploying to combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Peltola is a gun-collecting Alaska Native who began commercial fishing when she was six years old and was the captain of her own boat at 14. And MGP is a 35 year old Latina mom who co-owns and operates an auto repair and machine shop with her husband (they also built their own house).

Exhibit 1: Vibes

They look like normal thirty and forty somethings. Fit, cool, thirty and forty¹ somethings — but normal people nonetheless. There’s a line of thinking that this is how candidates can overperform: just send out some moderate vibes, maybe a few poll-tested messages and a good ad.

Electoral outliers

Whatever they’re doing, it is working. Democrats only represent five districts where Trump won a majority.

And three of them are these Blue Dog co-chairs, all of whom represent very Trumpy districts. There are two additional longtime Democrats in districts that Trump won by fewer than three points.² Meanwhile, Trump won the Blue Dog chair districts by 4 (MGP), 6 (Golden), and 10 (Peltola). They ran 5%, 12%, and 20% ahead of Biden.

They are outliers.

Exhibit 2: Legislative Outliers Credit: Echelon Insights, augmented by author

OK so these three look pretty cool, and they’re winning a bunch of Trump voters. The good vibes help, for sure. But it isn’t just that they seem like Barack Obama circa 2009. They vote like the type of Democrats who once gave Obama sixty votes in the Senate.

This chart shows how often House members vote with Joe Biden, compared to the presidential margin in their district.

Credit: FiveThirtyEight, augmented by author

The Matthew Effect of legislative and electoral outliers

MGP and Peltola are both in their first term. Golden, meanwhile, has been increasing his margins each cycle — growing from a narrow 2018 win to a six-point win in 2022. And of the dozens of Democrats who entered the House after the 2018 blue wave, he’s the only one still standing in a Trump district.

It is probably not a coincidence that Golden breaks from Biden more. Consider the 2022 elections. Golden went in with a voting record that would allow him to credibly distance himself from Biden; he voted with Biden 88% of the time. Compare this to those who lost:

• Tom O’Halleran (100%)

• Cindy Axne (100%)

• Tom Malinowski (99%)

• Sean Patrick Maloney (100%)

• Elaine Luria (99%)

• Al Lawson (100%)

In the book Outliers, catchphrase enthusiast Malcolm Gladwell describes the “Matthew Effect.” Named for the biblical character for whom interest compounds, the most memorable example is of the NHL players who are disproportionately born in January. Because New Year’s is the cutoff date for youth hockey, the players born early in the year have a big advantage in the younger years where ten months of physical development makes a big difference. The associated confidence and experience of being a better four-year-old hockey player trickle all the way up into the NHL.

There appears to be a similar potential advantage for Trump-district Democrats. To be a Blue Dog in a Red District means starting off from an entirely different place - everyone knows you need to win over Republicans, and that your race is probably a long shot. So you have the runway of potential authenticity and confidence. If you are a relative long shot — Nate Silver gave MGP a 2% chance of winning in 2022 — then The Groups aren’t all over you. You can be true to yourself and true to your district’s voters.³

Golden has broken a hyper-partisan mold, something continuing into 2024 (a recent poll had him at +20 net favorability in his district while Biden was losing Maine by 20 points).

Of course, The Groups are also active in DC. 

Why is Jared Golden the only one who flipped a House seat in 2018 and stayed in a Trump-won district? There’s been some redistricting and runs for higher office. There have also been losses. All the while, Golden continues to gain. Slow Boring readers know why: Democrats have moved far to the left over the past decade.

Having a normal, decent, attractive person on the ballot is a good thing. But they can’t just seem cool, or meet people where they are physically. They have to meet them where they are on issues. And that means voting off the party line. This is not rocket science, although the political science research demonstrates that moderates do better in elections. And the elections analysts at Split-Ticket.org show this extends to caucuses — GOP Problem Solvers and Blue Dogs are the two most overperforming, gaining 1.2 to 3.2 percent on average.⁴

Democrats should stop conceding democracy and try harder to win elections

These three raise a natural question: if winning requires being an outlier, and voting like an outlier, how can that scale? Once you have a bunch of outliers clustered together, that’s more like a pack.

That’s what the Blue Dogs are working on. Six months after their August 2023 re-launch — the group almost fell apart before that — the Blue Dogs have endorsed another slate of candidates.

Adam Frisch ran a similar campaign to MGP, showing up with authenticity. And like MGP, he put a “safe” seat in play. Same with Will Rollins in CA-41, who — you guessed it — the Blue Dogs have also endorsed this cycle. In WI-3, against January 6th incumbent Derrick van Orden, Blue Dog-endorsed Becca Cooke seems pretty cool, too.

Last cycle, when we at WelcomePAC tried supporting several of those candidates, we encountered a problem: It is difficult to get people to solve a problem they do not believe exists. Democrats conceding winnable races in districts like these throughout the country is hard to believe. How many seats are uncontested that are more potentially competitive than Jared Golden’s? 

In 2022, there were 14 seats more-Democratic than Golden’s that were effectively conceded (the Democrat spent less than $1m). For this cycle, there are 14 where the challenger did not enter the year with even $200k on-hand. Three didn’t even have any declared challenger at all. In our quarterly Conceding Democracy reports, we analyze FEC reports. How is it possible, nine years after Trump came down the escalator, that Democrats cannot even get $200k into these districts in a $10B congressional spending cycle? 

Source: WelcomePAC analysis of 2022 election results and FEC reports

To solve this problem, you have to get specific.

The depolarizers

Running candidates in R+3 to R+6 seats isn’t just good to give Republicans a scare. It is the terrain on which future outliers can thrive.

So yes, Democrats need to field more candidates. But, as Slow Boring readers now, they also need to try harder to win elections that they are already competing in. And yes, those candidates should have moderate vibes. But to get electoral outliers, you need more than vibes: you need to legislate differently. To recall another Slow Boring classic, polarization is a choice. A choice that elites have made. In our hyper-polarized environment, those who overcome manufactured polarization – The Depolarizers – are worthy of significant attention.

The Blue Dog co-chairs are a good place to start.

1. Someone smart will point out that Mary Peltola is technically 50, but as a forty something who hangs out with other forty somethings, the point still stands.

2.  Marcy Kaptur was first elected in 1982 and Matt Cartwright in 2012.

3. Electoral reform advocates also point out that the three Blue Dog chairs were all elected in states that employ an election system different from the first-past-the-post plurality common in most states. In ME-2, an independent candidate received 11% of the vote the midterm before Golden was first elected on the second round of a Ranked Choice Voting election. While all three use different systems, each eliminates spoiler votes – and thus forces candidates to cast their nets more broadly.

4. While the GOP Problem Solvers and Blue Dogs overperform, the Squad and “MAGA Squad” underperform by even more: 5.5 and 7.3 points below expected, respectively.