https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/magazine/marie-gluesenkamp-perez.html
When Gluesenkamp Perez arrived on Capitol Hill, she tried to find commonalities with her new colleagues. She didn’t have much success. “I’m like: ‘Oh, your bio says you’re a small-business owner. What’s your business?’” she told Politico at the time. “They’re like, ‘Oh, we have a family real estate brokerage firm.’” One of the few friendships she did strike up was with Jared Golden, a third-term Democratic representative from Maine. Golden was first elected in 2018 — part of the anti-Trump wave in which 31 Democrats won in districts that Trump carried just two years earlier. But by 2023, Golden was one of only five Democrats still in Congress who represented Trump districts. He had a little more company in the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, but just barely. At its peak in 2010, the Blue Dogs had 54 members, but after the 2022 elections, only 14 remained. Then half of them left in a dispute over the group’s direction. With the coalition having dwindled to seven members, Golden was asked to lead it.
In his short time in Congress, Golden, a millennial Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had established himself as one of its most independent-minded members. Representing Maine’s almost entirely rural Second Congressional District, he was one of only four Democrats who deviated from the party during the vote on Trump’s first impeachment (two of them subsequently became Republicans) and the only Democrat to vote against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion Build Back Better Act (over a tax break for the wealthy); at the same time, he voted for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and Biden’s $700 billion Inflation Reduction Act. “The Republican Party spends millions of dollars telling people I’m a progressive,” Golden told me. “The Progressive Caucus spends time telling people I’m a conservative. A lot of people, especially the media, like to call me a moderate. I would say I’m none of these things and I’m all of these things. And my constituents are too.”