US Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME02) is the most successful Democrat in Trumpland, having won more crossover Trump voters than any other Democrat currently in the House, this in a district that voted for the disgraced president by 7 points last November. He’s also been a thorn in the Democratic leadership’s side, voting against Trump’s first impeachment, the George Floyd police reform bill, the CARES act and American Rescue Plan, closing gun background check loopholes and even Nancy Pelosi’s speakership bid.
His latest defection: joining eight other centrist-ish House Democrats to disrupt Pelosi’s strategy to get both the (bipartisan) infrastructure bill and the president’s social and climate policy agenda (opposed by all Republicans) into law. I spoke to him about this a week ago at his Lewiston office and you can read what he has to say in the Portland Press Herald.
Sidenote: It didn’t make it into the story, but I also asked him about the Afghanistan withdrawal (this prior to the attack that killed 13 US servicemen and at least 170 Afghans at Kabul airport.) He served in combat there as a young Marine and later returned to help run a school in Kabul. His position, in short: the withdrawal itself was long overdue and should have started after Osma bin Laden was killed in 2011. But its execution is clearly a mess.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.