The Democrats Trying to Win Back Rural America
What the Blue Dog movement needs in order to revitalize the liberal center.
One of the big questions raised by the 2024 election, and the breaking up of an older economic consensus, is what a coherent vision for the Democratic Party should look like in the coming years of Trump dominance. In November, Sam Kahn made the case for populist economics rooted in the burgeoning antitrust movement. Today, Tyler Syck offers a different perspective, arguing that a properly funded and intellectually robust “Blue Dog” movement offers the best shot for Democrats to win back rural voters. As ever, thanks for reading!
– The editors.
Twenty years ago, Pike County, Kentucky was Blue Dog Democrat country. Local elections almost always boiled down to the Democratic primary, since the Republicans struggled to field a candidate for most posts. In the 2004 presidential election, the rural coal mining county backed John Kerry, as they had almost every single Democratic nominee since Franklin Roosevelt.
But last November, Donald Trump won Pike County by a shocking 65 points. At a recent Democratic Party breakfast, the county’s last remaining Democratic official, a county judge, pledged that, unlike many of his colleagues, he will never switch parties—even if it means he is the last blue official ever elected in the county. The party faithful in the room took the judge’s promise seriously and knew that his prediction has every chance of coming true. And Pike County is not unique. Across the country, rural Democrats have been toppled by a newly ascendant populist Republican Party. Once the party of the working class, many blue collar Americans in the heartland now see Democrats as the party of out-of-touch social elitism.
It is exactly this dire situation that the new and improved House Blue Dog Caucus is trying to resolve. Founded in 1995, and long the resting place of racist, politically antediluvian Southern Democrats, the Blue Dogs have been revamped by three young politicians on a mission to make their party relevant in rural America again: Jared Golden of Maine, Mary Peltola of Alaska, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.
The Blue Dogs cultivate a combination of aesthetics and policy positions that they hope will allow their party to flourish: Moderate economic stances with a tinge of populism, candidates with unorthodox yet relatable personal backgrounds, and a social liberalism shorn of all moralistic tripe. In a recent video, Golden, the leader of the Blue Dogs, described the group as “rooted in … loyalty to the community we represent.” Though localism is the central selling point of Blue Dogs, they combine it with other typical centrist beliefs such as pluralism, intellectual humility, and gradualist politics. In 2023, Perez put it succinctly to the Washington Post: “It’s not just about flipping seats for us. It’s about the long work of turning the train around and getting back to place-based politics and not focus grouped, Twitterati agendas.”
But a couple of years in, their venture has had limited success. Blue Dogs remain a tiny fraction of their party and an even smaller fraction of the American electorate. Peltola recently lost her seat, and Democrats across the country were harshly punished by working-class voters in the 2024 election. The crux of the problem is that, though youthful and well liked, the reborn Blue Dogs have struggled to turn a handful of representatives into a full blown movement.
For centrist rural Democrats to become fixtures in American politics they require more than a couple of congressional seats—they need to win governors’ mansions and Senate races, they need intellectuals and publications, they need activists and social media influencers. For any of this to happen, they must first develop a cultural and ideological identity.
The Dog’s Disease
The Blue Dogs’ lack of a firm identity is, in many ways, a problem that plagues all centrists: what makes them different from the political extremes? On one hand, the Blue Dogs are Democrats and they carry all the baggage that comes with that label. Fairly or not, voters see them as just progressives in sheep’s clothing. No one becomes a Democrat unless they basically believe in open borders and foisting socially radical views on the electorate—or so goes the logic of many rural voters.
Though this stereotype is something of a gross exaggeration, there is a kernel of truth to it. On a range of issues, Democrats have moved far afield of the average American voter. This alone is perhaps not a serious issue for the party, except that Democrats tend to pounce on those who question their ideological doctrines with a fervor that would make New England’s Puritan settlers proud. One need only look at the reactions from mainstream Democrats when Blue Dogs break with party orthodoxy. Perez was recently savaged by fellow “liberals” for refusing to back Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Golden was viciously attacked by fellow Democrats for his opposition to the Build Back Better scheme.
Thus on the left, Blue Dog Democrats are squeezed from both sides—too left-wing for rural voters and too right-wing to be happily accepted by their own party.
The Blue Dogs’ problems with Republicans are in some ways more straightforward. To win, rural Democrats desperately need to attract the support of Trump voters. This requires the adoption of certain populist stances, which for most Blue Dogs has been in the realm of economics. Golden recently announced his support for higher tariffs to drive the creation of American jobs. Such economic appeals are good politics, but they also make it hard for voters to differentiate Blue Dogs from populist Republicans. As a result, the average rural citizen simply casts their ballot for the economic populist not associated with the Democratic Party.
The difficulty, then, is for Blue Dogs to develop an identity that separates them from progressive Democrats while also offering something that Trump cannot.
The Dog’s Bark
In an attempt to define his politics, Golden has taken to describing himself as “progressive-conservative.” Though the appeal of the phrase likely lies in its ambiguous sound, it is actually a rather apt description of the reconstituted Blue Dog Democrats.
The phrase “progressive conservative” was first coined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to refer to figures such as British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and American president Teddy Roosevelt. Both men hoped to reorganize their countries in a way that built upon the cultural and political traditions of the past. The combination of “progressive” and “conservative” refers to neither a school of right-wing political thought nor a left-wing activist philosophy. Instead, it denotes a broadly centrist approach to politics that recognizes the need to create a more just world while respecting the past.
The first progressive conservatives did not propose some radically new approach to politics. They pulled from a long tradition of thinkers who shared the common desire to blend tradition and progress. Men such as Marcus Tullius Cicero, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville defied the political conventions of their day to build an ideological middle ground capable of withstanding revolutionary forces from both sides of the political spectrum. Nor did the march of progressive conservatism in the United States terminate with Teddy Roosevelt. The presidency of his cousin Franklin Roosevelt and the Humanist Conservatism that emerged in the 1930s represented aspects of this centrist school of thought. Perhaps no politician has better embodied progressive conservatism than New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan worked throughout his long career to combine the very best elements of the left and right, grounded in the understanding that “liberals are people who would like to see things improved, and conservatives are people who would like to see things not worsened.”
At the heart of much progressive conservatism is a distrust of what William Butler Yeats called the “leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind.” Progressive conservatives believe that human progress hinges on respecting local custom and rejecting broad universal generalizations—whether they be an ardent faith in the spread of democracy or the elevation of national identity above all else. The central tenets of progressive conservatism must become the heart and soul of the Blue Dog Democrats’ agenda if they are to succeed.
The Dog’s Bite
So how to go about it? In recent memory, no political faction has done a better job of rising from obscurity to partisan dominance than the twentieth century’s conservative movement. After the tranquil, moderate politics of Dwight D. Eisenhower, many conservative Republicans felt they needed to play a bigger role in the GOP. To achieve this end, they started building new institutions that connected the many disparate intellectuals, donors, and voters who shared their views. William F. Buckley founded National Review to give conservatives a magazine in which to promote their ideas, a collection of businessmen founded the Heritage Foundation to guide conservative public policy, conservative lawyers teamed up to form the Federalist Society to encourage conservative judges, and activists like Phyllis Schlafly built community groups that deployed right-wing voters en masse to advance their social priorities. In a matter of years the conservative movement became a force to be reckoned with. Within the next two decades they controlled the Republican Party and the White House.
This level of success is perhaps too much to hope for in the case of the Blue Dog Democrats. However, the conservative movement does provide a good model. The creation of a dedicated think tank and journal would go a long way to generating the institutional support necessary to build up the Blue Dogs. In particular, such an organization should focus on two things. First, it should combine current Blue Dog policy with progressive-conservative principles to form a robust ideological identity. This would allow the Blue Dogs to promote themselves as the latest of a long historical tradition advocating a vibrant centrist approach to politics—one clearly distinct from political progressivism and Trumpian populism. By creating a hub through which authors, researchers, and activists can forge and defend progressive conservatism across the media, the Blue Dogs would ensure that their identity gets the visibility necessary for success. As the 2024 election has proven, online visibility is more important than ever, and the Blue Dogs need to establish a path to digital prominence.
Second, any new institution established by the Blue Dogs should work on cultivating new members of the movement. This naturally includes funding for writers and pundits. Also important is the promotion of progressive conservatism among the youth. Study after study has shown that young people are increasingly inclined toward political extremism. Yet as a professor in rural America, it is clear to me that many young voters feel alienated by the demagogic populism of both the American right and the neoliberal identity politics of the left. These voters are ripe to form a new base for Blue Dog centrist politicians in rural locations. Progressive conservatives should take a leaf out of conservatism’s book and fund programs designed to foster these political tendencies.
These two steps alone will not give the Blue Dogs all they need to flourish. The already-launched Blue Dog PAC will be instrumental in helping fund candidates in the often impoverished portions of the country where Democrats should be competitive. For that matter, good candidates who can contribute constructively to the movement will have to be found and cultivated. As part of this effort, everything from local races to Senate seats should be contested where possible. A distinct political identity and message will do much to make Democrats like Golden, Peltola and Perez more common.
In the modern world, political factions and ideas are a dime a dozen. One can hardly scroll through social media without tripping over some new and often bizarre political group clamoring for attention. Yet a revived House Blue Dog Caucus and its members would not be some fringe faction; they offer a legitimate path for bringing rural Democrats off the endangered species list. If they play their cards right, progressive conservatism may one day be the future of the liberal center.
Jeffery Tyler Syck is Assistant Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Pikeville in his native Kentucky.
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All of Syck's suggestions would seem to be about establishing a new and different cadre of elites that somehow will be more attractive to rural voters without actually interacting directly with those rural voters. Before the last election, anyone driving through rural America would see multitudes of Trump flags, signs and banners in front of homes and even businesses. Establishing new think tanks and journals will not cause rural voters to identify that strongly with candidates put forward by the Democrats.
"Once the party of the working class, many blue collar Americans in the heartland now see Democrats as the party of out-of-touch social elitism."
Gee, and it only took 50 years for them to realize the Democratic Party had been body-snatched by Progressives who consider them obsolete, irrelevant, and - dare we say it? - deplorable.