Everyone is talking about a very happy bald guy from the Midwest today. More to come, but check out the moderate voting record of Tim Walz we highlighted yesterday.
But for today, there’s two grumpy bald guys in the Midwest we gotta talk about: insurrection rally-attending Rep. Derrick Van Orden, and Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC chair Mark Pocan.
One week from today, Rebecca Cooke is going to win the Democratic primary in Wisconsin’s third congressional district. And in November, she’s going to flip the seat blue by appealing to center-right voters.
That’s making these two prolific tweeters in Congress very upset.
First, back in February, January 6th participant Rep. Derrick Van Orden attacked the WelcomePAC investment in the district by saying “George Soros is trying to buy Wisconsin.”1
Now, progressive poobah Rep. Mark Pocan is thrashing us daily on Twitter for being “conservative” for supporting Cooke’s efforts to win over center-right voters against the MAGA incumbent.
Insurrectionists calling us liberal and progressives calling us conservative? Sounds like we’re winning.
Listen to the Winners
When Welcome set out to understand how to win the middle, we started by studying proven winners. And those people are with Rebecca Cooke: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Jared Golden, and their Blue Dog PAC, along with NewDems, the largest caucus of moderates in the House.
WelcomePAC has already invested more than $300,000 in WI-03. And this focus on a stretch district may get a massive boost - House Majority PAC last week announced a $4 million reservation for ads in the Fall. But we have learned that sustained investment is required, with credible messengers delivering effective messages to the center-right swing voters needed to win a district like WI-03.
But this aggressive investment makes the professional progressives big mad. If that doesn’t bother you, go to Welcome’s Win The Middle page and select “Customize Amounts” for Rebecca.
When Winning Is Bad For Business
One of the weirdest things we’ve learned about winning the middle is just how many leftists are actively opposed to it - and how quick they will work together with the GOP to hurt moderate Democrats.
Mark Pocan is a classic case. Representing a deep blue district where Donald Trump gets less than 30% of the vote, Pocan tweets all the time, promoted the idea that “abolishing ICE isn’t that radical,” directs millions of dollars to consultants flooding Democratic donor inboxes with misleading spam, spend millions without ever having a competitive race (thousands of it on signage at the store he owns) and, according to Jewish Insider, “advances antisemitic tropes.”
Pocan has ranked in the top-10 for most tweets, but is not in the top-300 for bipartisanship.
Naturally, Pocan hates the Blue Dogs2, saying their endorsement “doesn’t mean anything about electability.” He replies to fact-based challenges to his Twitter attacks by talking down from his mighty perch in Congress, saying things like “Clearly you haven’t run and got elected at the federal level.”
When challenged with facts, the sitting member of congress makes light of the incumbent’s drinking problems: “Me thinks you got into Derrick’s liquor cabinet.”
And now Pocan is coming after WelcomePAC:
Wow. The conservative Dem Blue Dog aligned PAC has spent $170,000 … on Rebecca Cooke in WI-3 … this group has trashed both Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren. I’ve called for Cooke to refuse their money, but to no success.
Data & Vibes
You can read Lauren’s full write-up on the Welcome endorsement of Rebecca Cooke, but here’s what first caught our attention about her.
As a first-time candidate last cycle, Rebecca got 31% of the primary vote in a four-way field despite getting badly outspent by the daughter of a former congressman and the hand-picked successor of the outgoing congressman.
Rebecca Cooke spent $456,670 while Deb McGrath spent $655,688.
How did McGrath spent 44% more than Cooke, but Cooke got 63% more votes?
The data was clear, Rebecca Cooke knew how to win over voters. And the vibes are authentic, as MGP told The New York Times:
Gluesenkamp Perez sees a lot of herself in Cooke, and the two have become friends. But Cooke’s backstory also resembles that of another young Democratic congresswoman: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez’s working-class bona fides would seem to be even stronger than Gluesenkamp Perez’s; after all, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t own the restaurant where she worked as a waitress and bartender.
But when I asked Gluesenkamp Perez if she thought Ocasio-Cortez possessed the type of working-class perspective that she contends Congress is so sorely lacking, she demurred. “It’s not just your personal experience,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “It’s who you view as your constituency. Like, who are you there for? Are you there working for ideas? Or are you there working for people?” Because Ocasio-Cortez represents such a solidly blue district — where Democratic presidential candidates regularly receive 70 percent or more of the vote — Gluesenkamp Perez believes that Ocasio-Cortez is working for the former. “If you’re working for ideas, you are much more vulnerable to sort of activist capture than if you have the nuance of individual people,” she continued. “And people that work for a living are very diverse, and most of them are not socialists.”
Hold up - AOC, but for winning the middle? That is going to make some professional progressives very nervous.
Who’s Scared of Winners?
Mark Pocan only tweeted “Blue Dog” once in the years before the Golden-MGP-Peltola re-launch. The re-launch one that led to headlines like this from National Journal:
And pictures like this:
Now if you go search for Mark Pocan mentions of “Blue Dog” on Twitter, you’ll spend some time scrolling.
When hundreds of Welcome partners gathered in DC last week for WelcomeFest, one of the most surprising things was what was NOT talked about. For much of the last six years, centrist gatherings have been about how to beat MAGA while dealing with the baggage of leftist momentum. And sure, we had a session on progressive lies, but the rest of the program mirrored the chatter in the hall and at the bar - there’s something big happening.
It may be the Rise of Progressive Conservatives in Jared Golden’s keynote (covered here by Politico), or the dynamic (mostly female) candidates who are proving how to win the middle.
The new style of Blue Dog is threatening to professional progressives. Pocan and the professional progressives may not have experience winning the middle, but they surely see what our polling shows: Rebecca Cooke is going to win on Tuesday, and she can flip the seat in November. So they’ve only got another week to criticize.
Professional progressive leaders hate that only pragmatists win the middle. They really hate it when someone with actual small-p progressive credentials, like Rebecca, actually reaches out to win over voters.
And they really, really hate it when charismatic winners like Marie, Jared, and Rebecca come together to build a community.
If you can get past Mark Pocan’s agita and want to defeat Derrick Van Orden, go to Welcome’s Win The Middle page to give to Rebecca. The WelcomeStack community has raised more than $100,000 for Win The Middle candidates this year:
If someone knows George, send him our wiring info. But for now, that’s a lie.
The official Blue Dog twitter handle has literally asked Pocan to stop tweeting so much
I think the message of moving the party back to the center culturally gets diminished when engaging in unnecessary attacks on Democratic incumbents that are too personal in tone.
Even if it is hard, one should model the behaviour one expects.
Focus on winning races. Unless you are primarying a Democrat incumbent, then Democrat on Democrat personalistic attacks are off-putting.
I think there is an actual convergence of policy ideas happening in the party that needs further nurturing and that too should be a focus of WelcomePAC.
Factionalism is the wrong approach.