The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem

Most important, the new Blue Dogs wanted to make it possible for more people like themselves (“normal people,” Gluesenkamp Perez calls them), from more districts like theirs, to get elected to Congress. “For so long it’s been this narrative of to be a good candidate or a good representative, you should be a straight white male, no kids, J.D. and a trust fund,” Gluesenkamp Perez says. The twin realities of partisan gerrymandering and political polarization mean there aren’t too many places where the Blue Dogs think they can pick up seats. But the coalition’s chairs believe that in a handful of races, the combination of a red-but-not-too-red district and an extremist Republican candidate creates an opportunity for the right kind of Democrat. This cycle, the Blue Dogs have so far endorsed six candidates.

The most intriguing is Rebecca Cooke, who’s running to unseat the Republican firebrand Derrick Van Orden in a rural Wisconsin district. Cooke, age 36, operates a small hospitality business and works as a waitress. On the campaign trail, she is attacking Van Orden on abortion, Jan. 6 and a well-reported incident last year in which he cursed out a group of teenage Senate pages in the Capitol; she touts her parents’ dairy farm and her own employment history as crucial touchstones. “You don’t see a lot of people my age or with my type of background running for Congress,” she says. “And it’s because we’re all busy working.”

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.”

After her upset victory two years ago, Gluesenkamp Perez was celebrated not just by moderate Democrats but even progressives. A picture of her wearing denim coveralls embroidered with the Dean’s Car Care logo — two overlapping red lug nuts made to look like a rose — led some to believe that she was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose symbol is a red rose; in fact, the shop’s logo is a play on Portland’s nickname, Rose City. “Some people thought I’d be like a working-class pet and just like a useful mascot, like I was an undercover A.O.C.,” she says. “But that’s not who I am. Some people are like, ‘She doesn’t really think that, does she?’ And I’m like, ‘I do actually think that.’”