What Manchin Hath Wrought

​When Joe Manchin announced yesterday that he won’t be running for re-election next year, I’m sure there was a huge cheer among liberals.  I was not among those cheering.

Manchin’s decision pretty much guarantees that Democrats will lose the seat from West Virginia.  (Trump won the state by 39 points.)  And since the party only has a one-seat margin in the Senate, that puts them on the precipice of losing control.

I’m sure that some liberals would say “good riddance, he was a Republican anyway,” but that’s utterly foolish to the degree of thoughtless.  Not only did Joe Manchin vote Democratic about 60% of the time – most Republicans only voted with Democrats about 10% of the time.  (And a senator from West Virginia likely would vote with Democrats even less.)  But far worse than that, if Joe Manchin voted with Republicans 100% of the time, I’d still have been thrilled with him calling himself a Democrat.  Because being a Democrat meant that the party had control of the Senate, had the chairmanship of every Senate committee, and Chuck Schumer was the Majority Leader, not Mitch McConnell.  That all is at risk.

There are currently 10 senators running next year who are considered the most vulnerable.  A list I saw the other had the eight most vulnerable all Democrats.  Only the last two were Republicans.  And while those two were vulnerable, they were both Red states – Ted Cruz in Texas and Rick Scott in Florida.  So, while they could lose, it will be an uphill battle to beat them.  (From friends in Texas, Cruz seems seriously unpopular – but Republicans in the state tend to have a way of getting their victory.)

It's certainly possible that Democrats could hold those eight seats.  But a clean sweep of eight races is tough.  The one hope is that abortion and GOP extremism have been working against Republicans the last few elections, and that could seriously help those Democrats running for re-election to the Senate.

But there’s a lot of “ifs” in that picture.  And Joe Manchin removing that seat from the Democratic column hurts a lot.  In fairness, there’s no guarantee he’d have won again in the deeply Red state if he'd run.  He barely won by 3.3 points in 2016.  And he was the sitting senator and former governor.  So, there’s next to no chance a Democrat now will win there next year.

The other question is if Manchin decides to run as a third-party candidate, perhaps on the No Labels ticket.  While I don’t think he will – it’s a fool’s errand and why put himself through that? – he seems to have coyly left the door open for it.  However, much as I don’t want to see any third-party candidates even risk mucking up the presidential race for Democrats…I’m not convinced Manchin running on a third party would hurt Joe Biden.

As much as Manchin likes to paint himself in the middle, he’s really more conservative.  And whatever issues Democrats might have with Joe Biden, it’s not that he’s too radical left.  He’s moderate-liberal, but probably closer to being a centrist than I think Manchin is.  So, moderate and conservative Democrats -- which is Manchin's base -- are generally fine with the President.  That leaves progressives...and Joe Manchin will not be pulling in Democrats from the progressive wing.

The same with independent voters.  Some conservative independents might vote for Manchin -- but that's Trump's base, so any lost votes there would come from Trump.  As for moderate and liberal independents, they would seem to favor Joe Biden and not Joe Manchin. 

But it’s the GOP that might be most hurt by a Manchin candidacy.  Moderate Republicans who don’t want to vote for Trump, but don’t have it in them to vote for any Democrat.  So, they well might be happy to have Joe Manchin on a ballot as a safety value to vote for.

In fact, a couple months back, I wrote about a poll that presumed Joe Manchin and Republican Jon Hunstman as his VP would run on the No Labels ticket – which I think would be as good a Dream Ticket as they could have.  And the poll show with them in the race against President Biden and Trump…it was Trump who lost two points.

But as I said, I don’t think he’ll run.  The only reason to is ego, and getting crushed with zero Electoral Votes isn’t great for the ego.  But we’ll see.  As I said, he seems to have left the door open to do so.

More to the point though is that the biggest issue with Joe Manchin not running is how this impacts the Senate.  It doesn’t help Democrats at all.  But if the Republican Party keeps as dysfunctional as its been, keeps supporting anti-abortion, and keeps nominating extremist candidates and pushing extremist issues, Democrats could be fine in the Senate.

And I do think they’ll take back the House.  And all things considered, if in the end it happens that Democrats have to lose one wing of the legislature, I’d rather it’s the Senate.  Because as far-right conservative as Republican senators are, for the most part they are not…well, insane.  The same can’t be said of the House.

But…we live in hope.  And the election is a year away.