Blue-Dog Democrat, Endangered Species

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, May 26, 2022

 

It is easy to find Democrats who believe that their party’s problem is not runaway inflation, poor communication, or flawed candidates. The real problem, they contend, is that the structure of the U.S. government is biased against the Democratic Party and that the only solution is a sweeping, Constitution-busting rebuild from the ground up.

 

A certain kind of wonky Democrat will whine that it is just so unfair that Alaska gets as many Senate seats as California, or that Wyoming gets three Electoral College votes when it has only 576,000 people. (You rarely hear them making similar complaints about the District of Columbia, Vermont, or Delaware.)

 

The subtext is often that it is unfair that so many Senate seats and electoral votes are in the South and the Midwest — broad swaths of the country with majorities of white, culturally conservative voters. Never mind that recent history shows that a Democrat who deviates from party orthodoxy on abortion and guns gets a lot of leeway from culturally conservative voters on other issues. 

 

You don’t have to be as old as Joe Biden to remember a time when the Senate majority leader was a Democrat from South Dakota (Tom Daschle, until January 2005), the House minority leader was a Democrat from Missouri (Dick Gephardt, until January 2003), the president and vice president were Democrats from Arkansas and Tennessee (Bill Clinton and Al Gore, until January 2001), and a Democratic presidential candidate won West Virginia and Kentucky (1996). Democrats won Senate races in Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska in 2006; Alaska, North Carolina, and South Dakota in 2008; and Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and North Dakota in 2012. The current governors of Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina are Democrats. They love to blame their regional woes on President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” but Democrats were winning southern Senate seats as recently as the Bush and Obama years. In all these currently deep-red states, Democrats used to win a lot more House seats than they currently do, too. 

 

So, what happened? 

 

Most notably, a change of political climate brought relatively conservative “blue dog” Democrats to the brink of extinction. For a long time, the Democratic Party was largely in favor of abortion rights and gun control but left considerable room for dissent. Before the 2006 election, then-chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Rahm Emanuel boasted that his party’s House challengers were “moderate in temperament and reformers in spirit.” This meant candidates such as Heath Shuler in North Carolina, emphasizing his Evangelical Christian faith and pro-life views, and Brad Ellsworth in Indiana, bragging about the “A” rating he had received from the National Rifle Association.

 

But the number of elected Democrats in the South and the Midwest shrank, particularly after the 2010 and 2014 midterm GOP waves, and those who remained weren’t as interested in keeping room for pro-life or pro-gun voices in their ranks.

 

The only Democrats in Congress who still fit most definitions of “pro-life” are Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas. Minnesota’s Collin Peterson, who lost his reelection bid in 2020, was the last Democrat in Congress with an “A” rating from the NRA. The two Democrats in the House whom the NRA grades a “C” are Cuellar and Sanford Bishop of Georgia. Every other House Democrat receives a “D” or an “F.”

 

While Democrats are more progressive now than they were during the Bush and Obama years, this shift hasn’t had equal effect across the full spectrum of issues. You can still find elected Democrats who support a tax cut here and there, or who still support fossil fuels if they’re a big part of a state’s economy. A Democratic commander in chief has Democrats feeling hawkish on foreign policy again, too. But pro-life and pro-gun Democrats are virtually extinct.

 

Consider Heath Shuler’s old eleventh district in North Carolina, encompassing the western tip of the state and anchored in Asheville. The pro-life, pro-gun Shuler painted himself as a different kind of Democrat, and his constituents believed him; he won reelection by a safe margin even in the 2010 GOP wave. After a round of redistricting made the eleventh district more Republican-leaning, Shuler chose to retire and was succeeded by Mark Meadows, who served four terms and then became President Trump’s chief of staff. The seat was vacant for a little less than a year, after which, in 2020, local Republicans nominated former Meadows staffer Madison Cawthorn — who beat Moe Davis, a pro-choice, pro-gun-control retired Air Force colonel not in the Health Shuler mold.

 

Any pro-abortion-rights, pro-gun-control Democratic candidate would have a steep uphill climb in this district. But this year, Democrats nominated United Church of Christ minister Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, who describes herself as a lesbian, “BBQ-loving, football-watching proud Southern mom of three” but also pledges to “vote to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law in Congress,” calls for passing “common sense gun laws,” and has attended Everytown for Gun Safety rallies in support of gun-control laws.

 

Contrast the Democrats swimming upstream in that district with Louis-iana governor John Bel Edwards. As governor, Edwards expanded Medicaid, pushed to raise the minimum wage, approved pay raises for teachers, and signed an executive order protecting LGBT-identifying people from harassment or job dismissal. Edwards was a delegate for Barack Obama at the 2012 Democratic convention, supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, and (quietly) preferred Joe Biden in 2020. In other words, John Bel Edwards is a Democrat.

 

But in a state that Donald Trump won by nearly 20 points — twice — Edwards won 56 percent of the vote in 2015 and 51 percent in his reelection bid in 2019, becoming the first Democratic governor to get reelected in Louisiana since Edwin Edwards in 1975.

 

How did he do it? Not toeing his party’s line on abortion and guns helped a lot. In May 2018, Edwards signed into law a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A year later he signed a bill that outlawed abortions after an ultrasound is able to detect a heartbeat, effectively banning abortion after six weeks.  

 

And in 2020, Edwards signed a bill that removed local restrictions on where gun owners may carry and another that specifically allows them to carry in places of worship if the head of the church agrees. In 2021, Edwards vetoed a bill that would have allowed people to carry concealed handguns in Louisiana without a permit or training, but his reservoir of goodwill from gun-rights supporters was considerable.

 

This may be political science, but it’s not rocket science. If Democrats want to win more races in the South and Midwest, they should nominate candidates more aligned with the culturally conservative values of the South and Midwest. If Democrats nominated at least somewhat pro-life and pro-gun John Bel Edwards clones in every statewide and congressional race in these regions, then the Republican Governors Association, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee would have a lot of sleepless nights. (So would NARAL.) Pro-life and pro-gun Democrats wouldn’t win all these races, but they would likely win some and force the Republicans to fight and spend money to win a slew of races they currently see as slam dunks. Instead, Democrats insist on nominating Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina and hoping for the outcome to change. 

 

A party that wants to win more than 269 electoral votes and have big congressional majorities can’t just write off large regions as unwinnable, or as evidence of stupidity or nefariousness in the Founding Fathers. Republicans should feel cheered that so many Democrats would rather complain about the Constitution than support gun rights or oppose abortion.