Congressional Progressive Caucus vs. Blue Dog Coalition

[jpljr77]

Lots of blame being thrown at liberals today (Bayh, you suck). So just how did Congressional progressives fare when compared to their moderate/conservative intra-party counterparts?

It's been widely noted that 23 of 46 (50%) Blue Dogs lost last night. With too close to call races, we can call it 24 out of 50 losses (48%).

On the progressive side, 77 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus were up for re-election (none of the Senators were up and two retired). Three, 3, THREE lost...three out of 77 (3.9%) lost, including Grayson. Feingold was not a member of the caucus, but I guess we can include his loss in the "liberal bloodbath" numbers. That moves the percentage up to 5.1%.

So a 48% loss rate vs. a 5.1% lost rate. Yeah, it was the liberals' fault. :eyes:

[jpljr77]

1. I know that Blue Dogs often turn red seats blue, but I'm encouraged

that the progressive caucus now outnumbers these fools by a factor of more than three.

[Recursion]

2. I think the point was that going too progressive nationally makes the blue dogs' seats untenable

Nobody who gets within a mile of the Progressive Caucus could have held Gene Taylor's seat for the past 20 years. But the fact that our party is progressive is what made it impossible for Taylor to keep it last night.

Big tents have their pluses and minuses: the plus is that we got more seats; the minus is that we lost some coherence as a party. Now at least we will have a more coherent Congressional caucus coming in.

[RoccoR5955]

3. They will ALWAYS blame the losses on Liberals.

They always have and will continue to do so. Until hell freezes over.

[kenny blankenship]

4. An Inconvenient Truth that will be loudly ignored hereabouts