Joe Manchin Can’t Beat Republicans . . . So He Should Join Them

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, February 07, 2021

 

The West Virginia Senate seat currently held by Joe Manchin should be a Republican seat, and there is every reason to think that Republicans could take it in 2024.

 

But why wait?

 

Senator Manchin is vulnerable. He barely won reelection in 2018, squeaking through with less than 50 percent of the vote against the state attorney general. He is politically moderate, but he is nonetheless effectively Chuck Schumer’s man in a state that gave almost 70 percent of its votes to Donald Trump. Joe Biden, another familiar Democrat presenting himself as a political moderate, could not break 30 percent in West Virginia.

 

Senator Manchin is out of step with his own party. That speaks well of him, but it is awkward for a Democrat to oppose a $15/hour minimum wage, publicly funded late-term abortions, etc. He already is butting heads with Kamala Harris.

 

To no one’s great surprise, Progressive PAC — the people who brought you Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — are raising money to recruit a Democratic primary challenger to Senator Manchin. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema is on the hit list, too. The PAC’s promise is that Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema “will be primaried and replaced in 2024 if they join with Republicans to shrink their own party’s pandemic, climate, and economic plans.” So much for the spirit of independence.

 

Being the last moderate Democrat in the Senate hasn’t made Senator Manchin a king-maker — it has made him a target.

 

Republicans are for obvious reasons thinking more about the 2022 Senate elections, in which picking up a single additional seat would change the balance of power in the Senate, providing a much-desired check on the Biden administration, which has come out of the gates looking like the Bernie Sanders administration. Senator Manchin is not up for reelection until 2024.

 

But that doesn’t mean Republicans have to wait until 2024 to take the seat.

 

In 2024, Manchin will be facing an electorate with a strong Republican advantage in a presidential-election year, and he probably will be doing so after a bruising primary challenge from his left. Republicans should make it clear to him that taking the West Virginia seat is their top 2024 Senate priority, not because Senator Manchin is the worst of the Democrats — he is far from that — but because he presents a target of opportunity. There is unlikely to be another seat that represents as promising a pick-up for Republicans, assuming that they apply some care and intelligence in recruiting a good candidate for the race. (That Republicans cannot always be relied upon to do such things is Senator Manchin’s great hope for survival.) Nothing personal, Senator, just business.

 

This would be one way to convince Senator Manchin that his best shot at staying in the Senate in 2024 is doing what he probably should have done years ago: switching to the Republican Party now. Republicans should do what they can to ease his path.

 

Of course, he’ll ask for the moon. Republicans will have to ask themselves how much putting a brake on the Biden-Harris runaway train is worth to them. I would guess that it will be worth quite a bit.

 

This is not only about Senator Manchin’s reelection hopes, and it isn’t even only about tamping down the worst of what the Biden administration and congressional Democrats will try to do. Senator Manchin has an opportunity to shape American politics in a meaningful way for years to come.

 

For better and for worse, the shape of the Democratic Party’s future is known, and it looks a lot more like Kamala Harris than it does Joe Manchin. He is a 73-year-old, white, male moderate from a largely rural constituency in a party that is dominated by moneyed elites from a handful of big cities, most of them practitioners of an identity politics that would bound Nancy Pelosi in a nutshell.

 

The future of the Republican Party, on the other hand, is up in the air. The populism of the Trump years has revivified Republicans’ interest in certain economic ideas and points of view that they had long overlooked. The GOP doesn’t have to go out and recruit those populist voters, because those voters already are in the party — e.g., about 70 percent of Republicans today support raising the minimum wage. The Reagan-Bush era is well and truly over, free-trade Republican internationalists are on the ropes — and the future of the party is up for grabs.

 

A moderate former Democrat from a solidly Republican state, with an interest in energy, national-security issues, and a more activist health-care policy, could provide a few bridges between a few important factional divides in the GOP.

 

And if it matters at all, there is a very good case to be made that the interests of the people of West Virginia would be better served by having Senator Manchin in a position of genuine influence rather than in the position of looking over his shoulder.

 

There is no shame in Senator Manchin’s having a price — and no shame in Republicans’ paying it. Let’s make a deal — because that seat probably is going to go Republican with or without Joe Manchin.