Blue Dog Democrat. A politician of a specific conservative bent who is a member of the Democratic Party in the U.S. South.

In order to understand what a Blue Dog Democrat, or a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, is, you have to understand what a Yellow Dog Democrat is. The story is that the Blue Dogs are former Yellow Dogs who were, in the words of Representative Chris John of Louisiana's seventh congressional district, “choked blue.” Resistant to suffocation as they were, the Blue Dogs apparently just had to take a stand and be the kind of southern conservatives that they are. Perhaps this means that they will vote for a yellow dog only if it shares their ideology. I think the moral is to let dogs be dogs.