Voters or owners, seems Manchin has little to fear on both counts.
Why Joe Manchin Is So Willing And Able To Block His Party’s Goals
By Perry Bacon Jr. Mar. 31, 2021, at 9:53 AM
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However he is doing it, though, Manchin’s winning a very red state gives him incredible power. He is a lifelong Democrat and seems committed to the party. But he doesn’t really owe Biden, his fellow Senate Democrats or the formal Democratic Party much of anything — his political brand is really separate from theirs.
A protestor waves a “Black Lives Matter” flag at a demonstration at the Washington Mall. Behind them, you can see that the mall is packed with people, and the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument are visible.
So Democrats don’t have much, if any, leverage over the West Virginia senator. Prominent Democrats are surely aware that Manchin could switch parties and join the GOP and that that might help his political career, so they can’t really attack him too harshly when he takes more conservative stands. Also, there is virtually no chance that a Democrat to the left of Manchin could win a general election in West Virginia, so Democrats can’t really keep Manchin in line with the threat of a primary challenge, either.
“What are they going to do … go into West Virginia and campaign against me? Please, that would help me more than anything,” he told The New York Times recently, referring to the inability of the Democratic left to challenge him.
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his all explains why Manchin can buck Biden and other Democrats without fear of electoral repercussions, but it doesn’t necessarily explain why he is doing so.
Why Manchin is pushing the Democratic agenda rightward
You might say, “Duh, reelection.” But it’s not clear that Manchin’s behavior is totally, or even mostly, electorally driven. First, we’re not positive that Manchin will run again. The West Virginian will be 74 in August. So, if he seeks another term — he’s up for reelection in 2024 — he would essentially be planning to remain in the Senate until he is 83.
Old age isn’t the only reason Manchin might retire. He may be great at electoral politics, but Manchin is not immune to the broader political environment — one where, as we mentioned, the majority of people in red states such as West Virginia increasingly vote only for Republican candidates. Manchin was first elected to the Senate in a special election in 2010, winning the race by 10 points. Two years later, he won reelection by 24 points. But in 2018, he won by only 3 points. It is likely Manchin would have lost his Senate race had it taken place in either 2016 or 2020, since a presidential election would have drawn out more solidly Republican voters than a midterm. Manchin’s next race will be in 2024, which is, of course, a presidential election year, so Manchin might be an underdog.
And even if Manchin is running and thinks he can win, it’s not totally clear that his moves right now to limit Biden’s agenda are that electorally helpful. Manchin no doubt benefits electorally from keeping some distance from the Democratic Party. At the same time, can Manchin really earn a lot of votes by pushing Democrats to offer people $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits instead of $400, as he did during the stimulus negotiations? Will West Virginia swing voters in 2024 remember and appreciate that Manchin wouldn’t go along with Biden’s nominee to run OMB? On both questions the answer is probably not. In fact, on the most-high-profile issues (the stimulus package, Trump’s impeachments), Manchin tends to vote with his party.
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So, if it’s not all about electoral politics, what else is driving Manchin to break with Democrats?
Third, it’s entirely possible that Manchin really cares about voting rights but thinks that getting rid of the filibuster and passing election-reform legislation on party-line votes is bad electorally for the broader Democratic Party (not just for him) and worse than Democrats trying to win elections even after some of these GOP-backed voting laws are in place. Manchin, as I noted earlier, seems deeply committed to the Democratic Party. But he might disagree with the dominant electoral thinking in the party. After all, emphasizing bipartisanship is Manchin’s strategy, and he’s the one winning in a super-Republican state.
Fourth, Manchin seems to be ideologically to the right of most congressional Democrats, electoral considerations aside. In a Democratic Party that is increasingly organized around pushing for economic and racial equality, Manchin and the party’s more liberal members are essentially from different planets. There is little evidence that Manchin got into politics to implement his deeply held vision for changing the American economy (like Sen. Elizabeth Warren) or its racial policies (Sen. Raphael Warnock). Manchin is more an old-style politician. He grew up in a small coal mining town in West Virginia (Farmington), where his father and grandfather had both been mayor. In 1982, at age 35, he was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates and climbed the ladder from there — state senator, secretary of state, governor, U.S. senator.
“Joe Manchin was always a center to center-right Democrat,” said Plante. Plante managed the 1996 gubernatorial campaign of Charlotte Pritt, who defeated Manchin in the Democratic primary that year. Back then, Manchin’s more business-aligned moderate politics were to the right of the state, which was dominated by Democrats aligned with labor unions.
As the current Democratic Party moves left, Manchin has to be more cautious for electoral reasons. But there is little evidence that he is trying to push that boundary — to be as liberal as West Virginia will allow. In contrast, Biden seems to be trying to move as far left as electorally possible on a number of issues.
Put all that together and the Democratic Party’s fate is in the hands of a man who doesn’t owe the party anything, can’t support some of its agenda for electoral reasons and probably just disagrees with some of that agenda anyway.
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