By SALENA ZITO • 1/29/17

— What a difference a decade makes.

In the 2006 midterm elections, every single Democrat running for office in Cambria County, the county this old industrial city sits in, garnered nearly 70 percent of the voters' support up and down the ballot. From Gov. Ed Rendell, to Sen. Bob Casey, to the late congressman Jack Murtha, they all owned this region electorally.

Same goes for the legislative races for the state House and Senate.

Ten years later, nearly every single Republican running for office here garnered nearly 70 percent of the voters support up and down the ballot with the exception of two state house seats. Donald J. Trump, Sen. Pat Toomey, Rep. Bill Shuster and Rep. Keith Rothfus all won broadly.

But this isn't the story of Donald Trump. This is the story of how the Democratic Party fell into the darkness of the wilderness in a county that was once one of the most Democratic counties in this state.

It is also the story of the near extinction of the Blue Dog Democrat, a moderate, pro-life, pro-gun legislator and fiscal hawk who used to fit like a glove in regions like this all over the country.

In the 2006 midterms, Democrats such as then-Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emanuel understood their path back to the majority was through moderate Democratic candidates; he was right. Voters no longer trusted the Republican majority but were not looking to vote for a liberal Democrat. When the Democrats offered up moderate candidates, their middle-of-the-road ideology jelled with the majority of Americans.

They won and they won big.

And the Blue Dogs coalition, 44 moderate members from across the country including four here in Pennsylvania, became the shining example of what Americans wanted, a Democratic Party that more closely resembled their grandpa's party.

In short, someone who would bridge the gap of the fringes of both parties and nudge them towards the middle.

But at the same time that the moderate coalition was being built, the left-wing of the party began to flex its muscle. In that same midterm election, the early signs that Democratic moderates were going to have a family fight on their hands were emerging in the U.S. Senate primary race in Connecticut. Sen. Joe Lieberman became the prime example of the type of Democrat the emerging progressive Left wanted to shed.

Using all of the tools of an emerging social media platform, they were very effective at getting the activists in the party to oust him. His defeat in the primary marked the beginning of the end of moderates inclusion in the Democratic Party. Yes, Lieberman went on to win the war in the general election, but the table was set for the great shove of moderates out of the party. Ironically, this happened the same year that they won the majority in the House for the first time in 12 years on the backs of moderate candidates.

Today the Blue Dogs are decimated, there are only 17 left, only two of them women. And every year they face expensive, heated primary battles from progressives, and are about to face the same onslaught next year from the 2018 Bernie Sanders purists who want them out of "their" party. Legendary Democratic strategist Dane Strother thinks that is a very bad idea.

"If the Blue Dogs do not have a seat at the table, and if they do not rebuild, the Democrats will never hold the majority again," he said bluntly.
Strother added that if there is a progressive purity test, "Then we will be in the wilderness for the next forty years," he said.

"I think the Blue Dogs have to be revived and respected this cycle. There will be a test. If the party does not back the incumbent Democrat Blue Dog in the primary then the Democrats will have a big problem for a long time. We can't become so ideologically pure that we push moderates into the GOP ... because that is what we are doing right now," he said, adding that the party that holds onto the middle is the party that will govern.

Strother believes that the DCCC must back the incumbent Blue Dogs overtly during the primaries to send a message that the party does want a bigger tent. "There is no one who looks like me in the party anymore," said Kevin, a Johnstown Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton reluctantly, "Every single thing that is part of my weekly routine is constantly under attack by my own party. I am a gun owner, I am pro-life and I work in the energy sector. That pretty much makes me an enemy of my own party,' he said.

"I voted for Mark Critz," he said of the former legislator who lost to Republican Rothfus in 2012. "But this year I voted for Rothfus, because my party's candidate may as well have been running a campaign for a seat in Silicon Valley," he said.

Here in the majestic Allegheny Mountains, where towns and villages are nestled in the hill and valleys along this Appalachian Ridge, these voters have had such a deep tradition of voting Democratic for over a century that some believe they were born with a Democratic Party registration card attached to their crib. They are small business owners, coal miners, steelworkers and farmers. They still cling to the old party ideals that the government can do good things for its people and that programs such as Social Security and Medicare are their God-given rights.

But that is where their connection to the party ends. And as Republicans embrace more of the Democrats' former populist tendencies, mixed in with their message of liberty and national pride, moderate Democrats have become quite comfortable being considered Republicans. Kyle Kondik, political analyst at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, says a good lesson for any political party is to focus on winning over ideology, "Particularly when trying to compete in diverse districts," he said.

Whether the Democrats can find those kinds of candidates will help determine 2018's results, along with Trump's standing and, also, the number of Republicans who retire from competitive seats. Right now the Blue Dogs are a tiny minority of a minority and their down-ballot legislative bench, state House and Senate seats are just devastated, having lost over 1,000 seats since 2009.

"We need to stop talking about winning 3 million more votes than Trump and start talking about all of the state house, senate and congressional seats we've lost and why," said Strother. "Ignoring, deflecting or not facing the problem is just digging our heads in the sand, and quite frankly we are running out of sand."

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