Blue Dogs and political tides

By Dave Anderson:

Charlie Cook has said that he would not be surprised if the Democrats lost 20 seats in the House this cycle. His current listof vulnerable Democrats are, not surprisingly, concentrated among Democrats who represent strongly Republican leaning districts. These Democrats can be divided into two groups. Those who have been there forever and have demonstrated an ability to win and hold conservative seats in any political environment, and those who came in on one of two large Democratic waves.

Digbynotes the obvious as stated by Charlie Cook, the probable losers would be overwhelmingly Blue Dogs.  The Progressive Caucus by and large will hold its membership even after a 1934 style wipe-out while the Blue Dogs would be destroyed in an inverse 2006/2008 supercycle. 

 

But arguably the people they would lose would be the Blue Dogs who aren't voting with [the president] anyway.

 

This is what I am not grokking on Blue Dog strategy; a good chunk of their membership has been elected in the past three years.  A solid proportion of that chunk owe their electoral fortunes to a political environment where the winds were at their back.  And even in those situations, the winds barely pushed them over the finish line.  They now have the power of incumbency and superior fund-raising to insulate them slightly from either a cross-wind or a headwind, but those powers are not that strong if there are any political gusts. 

 

 

If the newer Blue Dogs want to keep their jobs in significant numbers, they need to generate enough accomplishments while also crossing their fingers hard enough and luckily enough to generate at worst a neutral political environment where the advantage of incumbency should slow the melt or more advantageously create a generically Democratic favorable environment.  A big accomplishment such as healthcare is one way of actually delivering on a core Democratic policy promise of the past three generations while also positioning Blue Dogs to benefit from their political arbitrage point.  I don�t see where the group pay-off is for killing healthcare from even a purely selfish point of view of the Blue Dog individual member.