#BlueStarByte: Blue Dog Coalition

The Blue Dog Coalition emerged in the wake of the 1994 midterm elections, which saw Republicans net 54 seats in the House of Representatives. Pete Geren, a Democratic Congressman from Texas, one of the coalition’s founders, famously asserted that moderate Democrats in Congress had been “choked blue” by House Democrats’ left-of-center members. Geren’s quote was combined with the term “Yellow Dog Democrat,” a term popularized in the 1920s to describe Democratic politicians from the American South who were accused of prioritizing loyalty to the Democratic Party over the interests of their constituents. Specifically, the term comes from the saying “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket.”

In choosing the name “Blue Dog,” the coalition’s founders aimed to differentiate themselves from the Democratic Party establishment, which they portrayed as modern-day “Yellow Dog Democrats,” while borrowing from Geren’s phrase “choked blue.” The blue dog symbology was inspired, in part, by the famous Blue Dog paintings by the Cajun artist George Rodrigue from Louisiana. The association with Rodrigue’s art is alleged to have been inspired by the fact that one of the coalition’s founders—the former Democratic Representative from Louisiana, Billy Tauzin—had one of Rodrigue’s Blue Dog paintings hanging in his office, where the coalition’s members regularly met in its early days.