If you are hanging your hopes for progressive legislation on a West Virginia Democratic Senator, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Focus on winning Pat Toomey, Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, and Richard Burr’s seats, and holding on to Mark Kelly’s and Raphael Warnock’s seats.
Show Arizona and Georgia aren’t flukes and the Midwest is in play, and then you can tell Manchin to get the f*** off the bus, we got places to be.
Thos models of ideology are really models of partisanship. On the one hand, it minimizes subjectivity. On the other, it’s not at all clear what is being measured.
Oh, heck. I didn’t even realized he had a D. I thought he was Republican until your comment made me do a double-take.
The only reason Dems tolerate him is because he’s a Dem in West Virginia. People act like we could just get a more liberal senator in there, but there’s no chance. Trump won West Virginia in 2016 and 2020 with almost 70% of the vote. No one more to the left of him is electable there.
They need to win senate seats in other areas if they want to be able to make big moves.
You can’t legislate respect for democracy through any vote and no one is suggesting it. They are suggesting creating a legally actionable framework for protecting democracy, even when the party in power doesn’t respect it.
No, they didn’t. Republican moderates voted for Republicans. Trump won a larger share of self identified Republican voters in 2020 than he did in 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/exit-polls-changes-2016-2020/ Also 2020 wasn’t particularly close by modern American presidential standards. There was some delay in results because of counting ballots, but the race wasn’t unusually close. The only race since 1990 that had the winner doing better than Biden in both electoral and popular vote share was 2008. The ACA part is also a lie. The cloture vote in the House for the ACA had all 39 voting Republicans in opposition and one non voter and the passage votes looked similar. The repeal efforts of 2011 had unanimous Republican support in the House and Senate, but was blocked by the Dem Senate majority. 2013 went all the way to a shutdown and 2015/16 was stopped by a veto. You could almost make a case for one of the 2017 repeals, but the other one was blocked by Rand Paul, hardly a moderate.
Most people here understand that. My point is that, given the way he votes and his antipathy toward defending liberal democracy, the Dems might as well kick him out of caucus and stop letting him hold the party hostage. He can then go back to being another conservative non-entity who can’t deliver anything special to his brain-dead voters.
Yeah, this idiot needs to fuck right off. I ship the hell outta him with moscow mitch.
The problem is that his actions as a senator are provably dangerous to some of us. It’s not life would be easier if he was more liberal type stuff, it’s that he is actively trying to deny our rights. We need to replace him, if not in WV then in some other state.
I am not going to excuse his actions just because he’s a D and he holds the balance of power. If anything, that should mean that he is held to a higher standard.
People said the same shit about Georgia… yet thanks to the hard work of people like Stacey Abrams here, the Democrats have a thin margin in the Senate. Making broad, sweeping assumptions about entire states is not particularly helpful.
I hope the history books don’t remember Joe Manchin.
They refuse to play by the rules, and none have faced any real consequences. It’s beyond fucked up, it’s monstrous.
While I agree with your sentiment, anyone who has paid any attention to his past positions is not shocked at all. His constituency is Q-addled and Trump addicted. If he supported anything allowing not-white people to increase their voice to match their population, they would throw him out on his ass. So yes, he chose his own power over the fate of the country. Lovely gentleman, no?
Fair enough. I know you’ve seen of a lot of ignorant generalizations about “the south”. I’m just trying to point out the consistency in West Virginias voting during presidential elections. They also lack the racial diversity of someplace like GA, making it harder for someone like Abrams to mobilize lots of voters.
Someone is telling him that everything old is new again.
I am a WVian, and while I despair of the current state of the state, what you are seeing is not necessarily intrinsic to them. What you are seeing is people who are terrified. The state revolves around mining, and that industry has been in a death spiral for years. Repubs have very successfully painted this as the fault of regulation and environmental protection, and that has brought the stage famous for Matewan and Blair Mountain to support the bosses wholeheartedly. They truly see no place for themselves in the future most of us want. It’s a sad thing, to see such a beautiful state, with truly lovely people, vanish down that hole.
The most important thing is to ask Manchin, directly, if he thinks that any of his colleagues could be complicity in organizing or aiding the insurrection. The follow up being, if he thinks that even one of them was involved, how is voting alongside them to cover their actions in any way ethical?
Saying you want election legislation to be bi partisan when its the republiQKlans who are working on voter suppression and gerrymandering to steal elections is stupid. It’s like asking the school bully if he’ll sign this agreement to stop stealing your lunch money.
If voting supression bills failed in some state legislatures because a fraction of Republicans voted nay, then yes, bipartisanship is theoretically possible. If not-- well there’s not a sliver of hope.
Aparently, the republican dominated west virginia senate passed a voting supression bill with no debate and a united republican front. Bipartsanship seems foolhardy under such conditions.
He’s the Democrat’s version of Mitch McConnell. That’s not a compliment.
One of two West Virginia Senators have been Dems since 1958, with two for most of that time and the Dems carried the state in every presidential election except for three between 1932 and 1996, including going for Dukakis and Adlai Stevenson (once). There is only a two percent gap between registered Republicans and Democrats. It is hard to argue that the state is out of reach on any kind of consistency argument.
