PHILLIPS, Maine — As most of his fellow Democrats prepared to gather in Chicago to celebrate the historic nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Jared Golden was looking for empty hands to shake or ply with cold beer along a small-town parade route Friday.
“You got my vote!” yelled a man wearing a “F--- Biden” baseball cap after Golden handed him a Bud Light wrapped in a campaign-branded koozie. An aide towed a rusty children’s wagon filled with ice and beer and flavored seltzers.
Golden, a 42-year-old tattooed former Marine who says he carries a concealed handgun “pretty much always,” announced last week that he will not endorse Harris or even say how he plans to vote in November, as the Democrat seeks a fourth term in a district he confidently predicts Harris will lose.
Golden has always kept his distance from his party — both in Congress, where he votes more often with Republicans than any other Democrat, and back home, where he rarely appears with other Democratic officials outside of official events.
His TV ads tout how he fought President Joe Biden’s administration and worked with then-President Donald Trump’s. He has not attended a House Democratic caucus meeting since 2021. And he’s called on his party to knock off the apocalyptic “pearl-clutching” about Trump’s alleged threat to democracy. He condemns the “toxic” influence of “lifestyle leftism” that he says has led his party to drift away from its working-class roots.
Golden will need more than a few Trump voters to split their ticket — an increasingly difficult task in this polarized age when all politics feels national — to again win one of the whitest and most rural congressional districts in the country, and the only one in New England that supported Trump in 2020.
While not every Democrat needs to court Trump voters or past Trump voters as assiduously as Golden, he and his allies worry about the party losing touch with corners of the country by writing off efforts like his. And with Democrats only four seats away from the House majority, every district counts.
Back at the parade, Linda Ross, wearing a Trump hat and spotless white “Trump 2024” sneakers, called Golden over from the tailgate of a red pickup where she watched the progression of homemade floats, tractors and vintage cars.
“You’re bipartisan and you do a good job!” Ross said.
Not everyone was won over by his retail politicking, however. A man sporting an “I’m voting for the felon” T-shirt said he would take the beer to replace his empty, but had no need for the campaign koozie.
This year, Republicans recruited a 29-year-old state representative and former NASCAR driver, Austin Theriault, who may be a better cultural fit for the district than the besuited and white-haired politicians Golden faced in the past.
“Jared Golden is so desperate to hide from voters of Maine that now he’s claiming he won’t talk about his vote when just weeks ago he made a big show of saying he wouldn’t be voting for Trump,” said Shawn Roderick, Theriault's campaign manager, who accused Golden of “flip-flopping” on other issues like guns.
A lone wolf?
Golden's relationship with his party faced new strains amid this summer’s turmoil over the Democratic presidential ticket. Before Biden withdrew his re-election bid, Golden penned an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News titled, “Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine.”
Two progressive former professors responded with their own op-ed titled, “Jared Golden is going to lose this election, and Maine will be just fine.”
Though loath to say it on the record so close to an election, some Democrats in the state view Golden as an opportunist who postures against allies and panders to opponents with questionable results.
That go-it-alone approach on his party has made Golden an unusual and sometimes isolated figure in the us-vs.-them team sport of American politics. But it’s also made him a model for other Democrats looking to win back the kind of working-class areas that have drifted away from the party.
“He’s not a lone wolf,” said Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., who sought out Golden after she won a red district last election. “He’s just usually ahead of the pack.”
Golden is the only Democrat elected in the 2018 wave who won a Trump district and is still in Congress, despite perpetually being a top target for Republicans. He outperformed Biden by 13 percentage points in the district in 2020.
So his defenders say he knows what his constituents want better than anyone else and should be given the running room to do what he thinks he needs to.
“He’s not only over-performed in a red congressional district, he’s been able to hold it for several cycles, which is truly a feat,” said Lauren Harper Pope, the co-founder of Welcome PAC, which works to recruit moderate Democrats in conservative-leaning areas. “We should be learning from him, not the other way around.”
Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez, along with Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska, now chair the centrist Democratic Blue Dog Coalition, which they are revamping to be young, populist and salt-of-the-earth, moving away from its business-friendly and Southern roots that once defined the group.
“He was the first normal person I met on the Hill,” Gluesenkamp Perez said of Golden. “He’s just a normal dude who normal people in his district like and trust and see as one of them, and I think that’s still more important for lots of voters than anything about national politics.”
'Progressive conservative'
Sitting down with NBC News on the dock of a friend's nearby camp, Golden was clearly frustrated with the press coverage of his nonendorsement of Harris. He had just publicly attacked a local reporter’s “biased” and “politically motivated” questions on the topic.
“It’s just not a factor in what I think the everyday person will base their final decision on who they’re voting for,” he said. “Frankly, I think it’s a nice contrast with my opponent, who so far has spent about two months talking about nothing but who he is voting for and who’s endorsing him and trying to get me to answer the same.”
Trump endorsed Theriault, who made the former president's support a cornerstone of his message in the run-up to the Republican primary in June.
“I’d love it if that’s all he wants to talk about for the next two months,” Golden added.
As Golden sees it, it’s nobody’s business how he votes for president and he’s never endorsed in a race above him on the ticket, so why start now?
“I’m not going to alienate supporters by getting myself into the mix of other races,” he said.
He’s also not too worried about depressing Democratic turnout, noting Maine's unusually high voter turnout. “This is a persuasion environment, it’s not about base mobilization,” he said.
Golden compared himself to the newly independent Sen. Joe Manchin, an ally who he says was forced out of the Democratic Party by its “elite” and “now we may not win West Virginia again for a long, long time.” Golden, though, insists he’s sticking with the Democratic Party and will not follow Manchin or Sen. Angus King of Maine into changing his voter registration to independent.
He encouraged Harris to visit the district, which has an electoral vote to offer since Maine splits its Electoral College votes, though he said “she’s not going to win” here. Trump won the district in both 2016 and 2020, by 10 and 7 percentage points, respectively.
And if Harris does come, he’ll probably be campaigning out in some small town “I know I’m going to lose,” but where he will fight to keep the margins tight.
What he wants to talk about is supporting unions, affordability, health care, reproductive rights, taking on corporate monopolies in industries like agriculture, and fiscal responsibility — part of a “progressive conservative” agenda of “place-based politics” he has begun to articulate.
Unlike the traditional center-left program of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, he sees “progressive conservatives” as progressive on economic issues and social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights, but conservative on cultural issues that have alienated rural and working-class voters from the urban cosmopolitan base of the Democratic Party.
“What I am referring to is a political fault line I believe most Democrats don’t even know exists,” Golden said in a recent speech for Welcome PAC. “The backlash among my constituents to climate change policies, like electric vehicle mandates and higher energy prices. Hearing about ever-expanding levels of student debt amnesty for college kids they see trashing campuses on TV, while working people who didn’t go to college are just trying to make their car payments and maybe someday buy a home like their parents could.”
That means recruiting “better Democrats” who fit their districts, he said, pointing to examples of candidates the Blue Dogs are backing like Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin and Whitney Fox in Florida.
In his district, it also includes understanding people’s “emotional” connections to guns.
After last year’s mass shooting in his hometown of Lewiston, which saw more murders in a single night at the hands of an Army reservist armed with a semiautomatic rifle than Maine gets in some whole years, Golden stunned observers by reversing his opposition to the assault weapon ban and apologizing to constituents for opposing it in the past.
That reversal has created a major opportunity for Theriault, who has put the Second Amendment at the center of his campaign in a place where even many liberals hunt or own a firearm.
“I probably will lose some votes over it,” Golden acknowledged.
Still, he hopes that constituents will give him the benefit of the doubt as a former Marine who says he owns an assault-style rifle himself to protect his family and, given the threats public officials receive these days, often carries a sidearm.
“We’ll see,” he said before the parade of his change on guns. “There could be people who cheered me last time I was in it and maybe they’ll be flipping me the bird tonight.”
