John Cole’s rant about ass-covering Democrats thinking that voting against the Jobs Act is going to help them is well taken. In the end, though, it turns out that only two Dems voted against the bill: Ben Nelson and Jon Tester.

This might be hard to hear, but this might actually be a smart move on Nelson’s part, and in the Democratic Party’s best interest. Nelson’s success in Nebraska is tied not to “being moderate” so much as deliberately antagonizing Democrats. The more he does that, the better his odds in a very tight Senate race. And, ultimately, the better the odds the Democrats have of getting to 51 in 2013. Tester is an odder case–his actions this year indicate a classic Blue Dog-inspired strategy of standing by big banks and fiscal conservatism. He’s rightly scared of running against a man who I think has never been photographed without a cowboy hat and voted against Paul Ryan’s budget plan. Tester is going to be hard-pressed to out-folks Rehberg, and he’s not going to be able to pin Ryan’s dumbass plan on him. So you see a classic red state Democrat strategy taking form.

What’s sad about this is that we’ve seen this movie before. Last cycle, Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas found herself in dire political straits. She had grown incredibly unpopular after the health care reform vote, in which she positioned herself in the middle of the road and got hit from both directions. She drew a formidable primary challenger in Lt. Gov. Mark Halter, who ran an overtly populist campaign in which he actually was to Lincoln’s left on health care reform, among other things. Democrats spent enormously to help the doomed candidate defeat a candidate with a much better (read nonzero) chance of winning the seat. Lincoln won the runoff election, then lost later that year in a landslide. Now, to be fair, there are caveats. Lincoln was from what I read a well-socialized and popular senator. She was also one of the chamber’s few woman, who was being challenged in that case by a man. But come on. It’s true that organizations like the DSCC have an obligation to protect incumbents, but their primary goal is to win elections. At least it should be. But what’s true is that the Democratic Party as an institution does its level best to discourage populist politics–Chuck Schumer’s quote after Lincoln pulled through tells you all you need to know. Blue Dogs are the polar opposite of populists–their traditional issue set of being moderate-to-liberal on social issues, fiscally conservative and hawkish on defense is the precise inverse of what a populist politician would represent, for better and worse. And Democrats recruit an awful lot of Blue Dogs for open seats, but very few populists.

Put simply, the Democrats simply don’t favor a populist approach to politics, even though there’s a lot of evidence that it goes over much better. Sherrod Brown, for example, won what was supposed to be a close race in Ohio in 2006 in a walk after embracing populism. Mark Halter only narrowly trailed the race that Lincoln lost by dozens of points. And the splash that Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has made in Massachusetts is perhaps another indicator of the trend, we shall see. The Blue Dogs, on the other hand, tend to align directly with the preferences of the establishment (and get an incredible amount of support and respect from them in return, undeservedly). They were positively decimated last year and exist as a mere shadow of their former selves. The Blue Dog model has fallen decisively out of favor in red states, but the instincts of Democratic politicians still incline heavily along that direction. What’s frustrating is that the one excuse for it that ever cut any mustard–that red state Dems need to fundraise and don’t have access to the resources blue state Dems do–is outdated in the era of ActBlue. Halter’s campaign last year was done without any big WalMart contributions. So, with the lack of electoral viability on the one hand, and the more diffuse nature of fundraising as it exists now, I declare this model obsolete. Going forward, there’s really no other path open to Democrats in red states, they just need to realize it.

Just remember: the (blue) dogs are dead.