The Democrat from West Virginia drew the wrath of his party this weekend when he nearly torpedoed the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package over an unemployment benefit tax provision he claimed was a surprise. It was not the first time in recent weeks that Manchin has been singled out by members of his own party, who have criticized him for his hesitation to embrace progressive positions on issues ranging from abolishing the filibuster to defunding the police.
But wholesale condemnation of Manchin, either by other lawmakers or progressive advocates who disagree with him, fails to acknowledge the clear net benefits of having a Democratic senator represent one of the most solidly Republican states in the country, where, according to Gallup, conservatives outnumber liberals by an almost a three-to-one margin.
If Democrats want to dominate the legislative agenda, they ought to focus on winning new seats, not attacking established moderates. And the relevant question is not whether Manchin always votes the way the typical Democrat wishes, but whether he does so more often than the Republican senator who would almost surely replace him if he ignored West Virginia politics.
It is not hard to understand why Manchin votes the way he does. As congressional scholar David Mayhew famously put it, members of Congress are “single-minded seekers of reelection.” Like all other senators, his behavior is largely explained by the ideological makeup of his state.
Manchin himself makes no secret of this fact. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York recently took Manchin, as well as another moderate Democratic US senator, Kyrsten Sinema, to task over their opposition to a $15 federal minimum wage, stating that “two people in this entire country” were holding Democrats back from progress for working people, Manchin responded that he and Ocasio-Cortez “come from two different areas of the country that have different social and cultural needs.” Instead, he proposed…
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