James Carville on the state of Democratic politics.
I called James Carville hoping to get his thoughts on President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office.
He obliged — then, one question in, brushed aside the exercise to talk instead about why the Democrats might be poised to squander their political advantage against a damaged GOP.
His failure to cooperate may have been for the best since the first 100 days ritual can sometimes lead to dull, dutiful analysis. What Carville offered up instead was a blunt critique of his own party even after a successful 2020 election cycle — a sequel of sorts to his fulminations during last year’s Democratic primaries. The longtime Democratic strategist is mostly pleased with Biden, but it’s where much of the party seems to be going that has him worried.
“Wokeness is a problem,” he told me, “and we all know it.” According to Carville, Democrats are in power for now, but they also only narrowly defeated Trump, “a world-historical buffoon,” and they lost congressional seats and failed to pick up state legislatures. The reason is simple: They’ve got a “messaging problem.”
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What do you make of Biden’s first 100 days?
James Carville
Honestly, if we’re just talking about Biden, it’s very difficult to find something to complain about. And to me his biggest attribute is that he’s not into “faculty lounge” politics.
Sean Illing
“Faculty lounge” politics?
James Carville
You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “LatinX” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.
Sean Illing
Is the problem the language or the fact that there are lots of voters who just don’t want to hear about race and racial injustice?
James Carville
We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them. This “too cool for school” shit doesn’t work and we have to stop it.
There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it ain’t the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing. That’s what this whole damn thing is about.
Sean Illing
Sounds like you got a problem with “wokeness,” James.
James Carville
Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.
Sean Illing
Why not?
James Carville
Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled. And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.
I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish. We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.
Sean Illing
What does that mean?
James Carville
Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that’s probably the worst thing that you can say about her.
Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. That’s the problem in a nutshell. And it’s ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.
Sean Illing
I hear versions of this argument about language and perception all the time, James. It’s an old problem. What’s the solution?
James Carville
That’s why I’m doing this interview. Lots of smart people are going to read it and hopefully they can figure out that which I can’t. But if you’re asking me, I think it’s because large parts of the country view us as an urban, coastal, arrogant party, and a lot gets passed through that filter. That’s a real thing. I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about it — it’s a real phenomenon and it’s damaging to the party brand.
Sean Illing
Part of the issue is that Republicans are going to paint the Dems as cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists no matter what they say or do. So yeah, I agree that Democrats should be smart and not say dumb, alienating things, but I’m also not sure how much control they have over how they’re perceived by half the country, especially when that half lives in an alternate media reality.
James Carville
Right, but we can’t say, “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let’s just run as out-and-out socialists.” That’s not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost fucking no one wants to do that.
Here’s the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That’s the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.
So they just have to lose by less — that’s all.
Sean Illing
So what do you want the Democrats to do differently besides not having people peddle politically toxic ideas like abolishing the police? How do they change the conversation so that Republicans aren’t defining them by their least popular expressions?
You’re a strategist, James. I want to know what you’d advise them to do. You don’t have any complaints about Biden because he’s getting stuff done. He’s putting money in people’s pockets. But the Democratic Party is a big coalition and you’re always going to have people promoting unpopular ideas, right? Whereas the Republican Party is more homogenous and that lends itself to a tighter, more controlled message.
James Carville
Tell me this: How is it we have all this talk about Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and we don’t talk about Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in Congress? If Hastert was a Democrat who we knew had a history of molesting kids and was actually sent to prison in 2016, he’d still be on Fox News every fucking night. The Republicans would never shut the hell up about it.
So when Jim Jordan was pulling all these stunts with Anthony Fauci [Fauci was speaking at a congressional hearing about ending coronavirus precautions], why didn’t someone jump in and say, “Let me tell you something, Jim, if Fauci knew what you knew, if he knew that a doctor was molesting young people, he would’ve gone to the medical board yesterday. So you can go ahead and shut the fuck up.” [Editor’s note: Jordan denies knowing about the allegations of abuse when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University.] I love that Congresswoman Maxine Waters told Jordan to “shut your mouth,” but that’s what I really wish a Democrat would say, and I wish they’d keep saying it over and over again.
Can I step back for a second and give you an example of the broader problem?
Sean Illing
Sure.
James Carville
Look at Florida. You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent. Has anyone in the Democratic Party said maybe there’s nothing wrong with the state of Florida? Maybe the problem is the kind of campaigns we’re running?
If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. It’s certainly not a political environment I’m destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the US Senate. And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bullshit is a big part of it.
Sean Illing
If you’re a Democrat, you could look at the state of play and say, “We’re winning. We won the White House. We won Congress. We have power. It ain’t perfect but it ain’t a disaster either.”
James Carville
We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.
Sean Illing
Not to beat a dead horse, but Democrats and Republicans are dealing with very different constituencies. Democrats have a big tent, they have to win different kinds of voters and that means making different kinds of appeals. Republicans can get away with shit that Democrats cannot.
James Carville
Yeah, that’s a problem. We can only do what we can do. People always say to me, “Why don’t Democrats just lie like Republicans?” Because if they did, our voters wouldn’t stand for it. But I’m not saying we need to lie like they do. I’m saying, why not go after Gaetz and Jordan and link them to Hastert and the Republican Party over and over and over again? We have to take these small opportunities to define ourselves and the other side every damn time. And we don’t do it. We just don’t do it.
Sean Illing
Republicans aren’t just more comfortable lying, they’re more comfortable with slogans and sound bites, and that’s partly why they’re more effective at defining themselves and the Democrats.
James Carville
Let me give you my favorite example of metropolitan, over-educated arrogance. Take the climate problem. Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Where’s the identifiable song? Where’s the bumper sticker? Where’s the slogan? Where’s the flag? Where’s the logo?
We don’t have it because with faculty politics what you do is appeal to reason. You don’t need the sloganeering and sound bites. That’s for simple people. All you need are those timetables and temperature charts and from that everyone will just get it.
That’s not how the world works; that’s not how people work. And Republicans are way more disciplined about taking a thing and branding it. Elites will roll their eyes at that, but I’d ask, “How’s that working out for you?” Most people agree with us on health care and minimum wage and Roe v. Wade and even on the climate.
So why can’t we leverage that?
Sean Illing
What would you have Biden do to counter some of these messaging problems?
James Carville
I’d have him pick up a phone. I’d have someone in the White House pick up the phone. And when someone in the party starts this jargon shit, I’d call them and say, “We’re only a vote away. Our approval rating is 60 percent. We got a chance to pick up seats in 2022, and if you did this, it would be very helpful to us.”
Sean Illing
Are you sure those calls aren’t happening already?
James Carville
Maybe they are, but they need to be more effective. And we need more of them.
Sean Illing
There’s a philosophy on the left right now, which says the Democrats should pass everything they possibly can, no matter the costs, and trust that the voters will reward them on the back end.
Where do you land on that?
James Carville
First of all, the Democratic Party can’t be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s the fact. We don’t have the votes. But I’ll say this, two of the most consequential political events in recent memory happened on the same day in January: the insurrection at the US Capitol and the Democrats winning those two seats in Georgia. Can’t overstate that.
But the Democrats can’t fuck it up. They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can’t sit back and wait for it to happen.
Hell, just imagine if it was a bunch of non-white people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it. Every political debate would be about that. The Republicans would bludgeon the Democrats with it forever.
So whatever you think Republicans would do to us in that scenario, that’s exactly what the hell we need to do them.
The Court’s right flank is afraid that the monster under their bed will cancel them.
Here’s a quote from someone who, not that long ago, was widely considered to be on the cutting edge of conservative thinking about the law:
“Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously … and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”
Those are the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in a 2010 opinion concerning whether the public should be allowed to learn who signed a petition seeking to call a referendum on a state law.
They form a stark contrast with the attitude of conservative justices on Monday, only a little more than a decade after Doe, when the Court heard another case asking whether disclosure laws can be applied to political actors.
The conservative justices who heard this new case, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, showed little of the confidence and “civic courage” that Scalia once celebrated. Many of them bristled with paranoia that angry mobs lurk in every alleyway, waiting to cancel conservative speakers.
At two separate points in the oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch warned of a world where the government could demand to see your Christmas card list or a list of all the people you’ve dated in the past. Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly suggested that the Court must provide constitutional protection to any advocacy organization that is accused of being “racist” or “homophobic.” Justice Samuel Alito warned of “vandalism, death threats, physical violence, economic reprisals, [and] harassment in the workplace” directed against donors to an anti-LGBTQ campaign.
Americans for Prosperity is a fraught case, presenting sensitive issues concerning when donors to advocacy organizations should be allowed to keep their identities secret in order to protect them from reprisals. As the Court first recognized in the Jim Crow era, when Alabama tried to uncover the NAACP’s membership list, there are rare cases where donors or other individuals associated with advocacy groups must be protected from state disclosure rules.
But the Court’s conservative majority appears to believe that reprisals against political conservatives are now so common that it may require handing down a sweeping and potentially unprecedented remedy to protect their fellow conservative activists from the horrors of cancel culture.
So what is this case actually about?
The specific regulation at issue in Americans for Prosperity is fairly small potatoes. California requires all nonprofit organizations that raise tax-deductible funds within the state to disclose their largest donors to the state attorney general’s office. That office, which claims that it needs this information to investigate fraud in the nonprofit sector, is required to keep all of this information confidential from the public. But the attorney general’s office hasn’t always followed ideal security procedures, and some of this confidential information has leaked to the public in the past.
The plaintiffs in this case are two conservative advocacy organizations, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center, who claim that this donor disclosure requirement is unconstitutional. (In an email sent after I previously wrote about this case, a spokesperson for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation suggested that I note that the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is a legally distinct entity from a related group called “Americans for Prosperity.”)
The Court’s precedents are fairly clear about how this case should proceed. Most people know of the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) because of its holding that corporations could spend unlimited money to influence elections. But Citizens United also took a fairly permissive approach to laws requiring the disclosure of political donors.
Courts distinguish between what are known as “facial” challenges to a law, and more mild “as-applied” challenges. If a law is declared unconstitutional on its face, that means it must cease to operate entirely. But if a particular plaintiff prevails in an as-applied challenge, the government may still be able to enforce the challenged law against other parties.
Citizens United applied the Court’s preexisting position that, when someone challenges a disclosure law, an as-applied challenge is the preferred vehicle. As the Court explained, an organization that “could show a reasonable probability that disclosure of its contributors’ names will subject them to threats, harassment, or reprisals from either Government officials or private parties” may bring an as-applied case against a disclosure law.
Based on this framework, the Americans for Prosperity plaintiffs have a strong case. At one point during the oral argument, Justice Sonia Sotomayor — arguably the Court’s most liberal member — told California’s lawyer that “a reasonable person may not have much faith in the AG’s office after previous breaches” of its confidential information. And liberal Justice Elena Kagan also pointed to the trial court’s findings that there is a ”pervasive reoccurring” problem of public disclosure in the state AG’s office, and that donors to the plaintiffs ”would likely be subject to threats and harassment” if their names were disclosed.
So this could have been an easy case. Apply the same approach the Court applied in Citizens United, accept Sotomayor and Kagan’s understanding of the case’s facts, and grant relief to the two plaintiffs on an as-applied basis. The opinion could potentially even be unanimous.
How the conservatives saw the case
But the plaintiffs insist that they are entitled to facial relief — meaning that the state’s disclosure rule must be tossed out for all nonprofits, regardless of whether donors to those nonprofits face harassment, or even if they want to keep their donations secret.
Some of the Court’s Republican appointees seemed to think it would be extraordinarily burdensome to require challenges to California’s disclosure law to be handled on an “as-applied” basis.
“How do you think an as-applied challenge would work?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who was in Court to defend using the “as-applied” rules in this case. Should a charity “attach an affidavit or something saying we’re a very controversial charity and we think, if people knew who gave money to us … their rights to association would be chilled?”
Similarly, Justice Alito warned of a world where every single nonprofit that fears for its donors would have to “take California to court and fight the state tooth and nail for more than six years in order to avoid potential public disclosure of its list of donors.”
Realistically, these fears are exaggerated. Federal law permits courts to require a state that violates an organization’s constitutional rights to pay that organization’s legal fees. So, if California is too reluctant to grant exemptions to organizations that seek them, it will be hauled repeatedly into a judiciary dominated by conservatives — and will quickly learn that it has made a very expensive mistake.
Thomas, for his part, already wrote an opinion in Citizens United — he was joined by no other justice — indicating that he would strike down disclosure laws on their face even in the campaign finance context. And Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared to join Thomas’s camp on Monday.
“If the First Amendment protects the right to associate in private, why do we need to consider harassment?” Gorsuch asked at one point, suggesting that all donors who seek to influence politics through their wealth are entitled to remain private.
And then there was Alito, who joined the majority opinion in Citizens United and rejected the more radical approach laid out by Thomas in that case. He suggested that “in our current atmosphere,” political donors “to organizations that take unpopular positions on hot-button issues have reason to fear reprisals.”
The phrase “in our current atmosphere” is telling, because it raises the question of why he thinks the atmosphere was different in previous eras.
The seminal case establishing why advocacy groups should sometimes be allowed to receive exemptions from political disclosure laws is NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958). It involved an effort by the Jim Crow state of Alabama to force the NAACP to disclose its members to the state — most likely so those names could either be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan or placed on an employment blacklist.
Though the Court ruled in favor of the NAACP in this case, it only granted as-applied relief to the organization. It did not strike down the underlying state statute, which required most corporations doing business in Alabama to make certain disclosures.
Does Alito think that the atmosphere in the Jim Crow South was more unfriendly to “organizations that take unpopular positions” than the atmosphere we live in today? If as-applied relief was sufficient to protect civil rights activists, why does the Americans for Prosperity Foundation require more?
The most likely explanation for the conservative movement’s shifting position from the views Scalia expressed in Doe to the views expressed by most of the Court in Monday’s oral arguments is a problem of empathy.
People who express unpopular views — or those who enable organizations that do so — have faced harassment or worse for as long as there has been democratic politics. Just ask Socrates. And, to be clear, donors to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation should no more face harassment than donors to the NAACP. As Sotomayor and Kagan noted, the foundation has a strong argument on the facts.
But it is true that the values espoused by people like Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch are increasingly out of favor with the American public — the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — and the thing that distinguishes “our current atmosphere” from, say, the atmosphere when Alito joined the Citizens United opinion in 2010 is that Alito and people like him now correctly perceive that their views are on the outs. They are suddenly hyperaware of every incident where a business is boycotted because its owner opposes LGBTQ rights, or where a corporate executive is fired for expressing similar views.
But they’ve yet to explain why these incidents require a more protective rule than the one announced in NAACP. Or why the harassment faced by conservatives today is somehow worse than the threat that civil rights activists would have faced if their identities had been revealed to the Klan.
But is his love for the filibuster dooming the country to dysfunction?
With the deadline approaching, Democratic leaders were trying to line up the votes to pass their bill. But they had a problem: Joe Manchin had put his foot down.
The year was 1983, the setting was West Virginia’s statehouse in Charleston, and the deadline was the end of the legislative session at midnight. Democratic leaders wanted to pass a bill creating a board that could cap rates charged by hospitals in the state. Manchin, a 35-year-old first-term state representative, had opposed the proposal.
Dave Lieber, who was then a reporter for the Charleston Gazette, has written about what he saw happen that night. As the House of Delegates — Manchin’s chamber — was taking a series of votes, Manchin was “over in the Senate, he was kneeling at the desk of the Senate clerk, a really in-your-face move,” Lieber told Vox. Manchin, who had been elected just four months ago, was negotiating.
Around 11:20 pm, Manchin’s support for the hospital bill suddenly materialized, and the bill passed. Immediately after that, legislators unexpectedly brought up a new bill, one that would let physical therapists treat people without referrals from doctors. An uncle of Manchin’s was a physical therapist. And, Lieber recounted, one state senator opined to him, “they’re paying Manchin off.” A deal had apparently been made — though Manchin wouldn’t admit it when Lieber asked him.
This sequence of events is familiar for Democrats, where Manchin is the 50th vote needed to pass anything that doesn’t have Republican support (a liberal colleague greeted him with “your highness” earlier this year). Just last month, Manchin threw the party’s plans for President Joe Biden’s carefully negotiated $1.9 trillion stimulus bill into chaos, when he said he’d vote for a Republican amendment to cut off expanded unemployment benefits sooner. After a half-day long scramble, eventually resulting in some relatively minor changes, Manchin came back on board, and the bill passed in a party-line vote.
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Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
This month, Manchin put his foot down again. Spurning calls among progressives for changes to the Senate’s rules that could allow Democrats to pass all bills with a simple majority, he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed: “There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.” If he holds firm on this, Democrats will be drastically limited in what they can achieve legislatively, effectively dooming the party’s bills on immigration reform, gun background checks, union protections, policing reform, and voting rights in anything like their current forms.
“The op-ed was as clear as it could be,” Manchin told Vox in an interview last week. “If you want to argue about it for two years, then you’re going to waste a lot of your energy and your time.”
Manchin represents a more conservative state than any other Democrat in the US Senate; he identifies as pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-business. He has frequently voted with Republicans, and when asked about “defund the police,” he once responded, “Defund, my butt.” But so far this year he has backed nearly all of Biden’s nominees, and his vote has had a tendency to materialize when Democrats really need it.
Yet Manchin says the nation’s political ills come from too much extremism and unwillingness to compromise on, yes, both sides. In his view, this explains everything from congressional dysfunction to the storming of the Capitol to the electoral collapse of the Democratic Party in his state. He says the national party has gone too “far on the extremes” and fallen out of touch with “how most people live their lives.”
Democrats are increasingly concluding that the Senate, and the political system, is broken. But Manchin thinks he’s saving the country from an even worse fate: “violent swings” from one party’s total control over the law to the other’s. “I truly believe in my heart of hearts, if we get rid of the filibuster, we would lose the purpose of this democracy, of this republic, which is for the people,” he said. “Not on my watch is that gonna happen.”
“It might happen on somebody else’s watch,” he added. “God help us as a country if it does.”
Where Manchin came from
Manchin wasn’t the first politician in his family. One of his uncles, A. James Manchin, who’s been dubbed “perhaps the most colorful politician in West Virginia history,” was secretary of state when Joe negotiated that deal in 1983 (A. James would later become state treasurer and end up impeached for financial mismanagement). Manchin’s grandfather and father had both served as mayor of Farmington, the coal mining town where Joe was born. His grandfather owned a grocery store, his father a furniture store. Another uncle was one of 78 coal workers who died in the 1968 Farmington mine disaster.
The Manchin name helped Joe get his foothold in politics, but to advance further, he’d have to throw some sharp elbows. After just over a year in the state House, he tried to jump to the state Senate by challenging an incumbent Democrat in 1984. But that incumbent was backed by the West Virginia Education Association, and the teachers union engineered a challenge to whether Manchin truly lived in the district. He didn’t — he had listed a post office box as his address — so the state supreme court threw him off the ballot. This didn’t keep Manchin down long, because his onetime opponent had a stroke and resigned soon after winning. Manchin sorted out the residency issue and won the open seat in a special election two years later.
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Bob Bird/AP
Opposition from unions would be the frequent backdrop to Manchin’s early career. He was a conservative Democrat and widely viewed as a candidate of business interests (he started his own business, the coal brokerage Enersystems, in 1989). In the state Senate, Manchin backed a proposal to overhaul West Virginia’s worker’s compensation system that labor cried foul over. This would prove a problem when he made his first run for governor in 1996, and the state’s unions lined up behind his opponent — a former state senator, coal miner’s daughter, teacher, and staunch liberal named Charlotte Pritt.
The race got infamously nasty. After pledging not to run any negative ads, Manchin ran one claiming Pritt supported sex education for first-graders (Pritt’s team said this was distorting the meaning of a bill she’d backed). Pritt fought back with her own ad claiming Manchin’s business caused 400 coal miners to lose their jobs (Manchin was furious and insisted this was completely untrue). In the end, Pritt ended up winning the primary by a 7-point margin.
During the primary, Manchin had signed a pledge to support the Democratic Party’s nominee (intending this as a club against Pritt, who had refused to do this in the previous governor’s race). But after months of silence, Manchin roiled the contest in October by announcing that he would not support Pritt due to her lack of “integrity and character.” Manchin claimed that he’d attempted to mend fences, but that Pritt had refused to renounce her attack on him about the coal miners’ jobs.
A few weeks later, Pritt lost to the Republican nominee, and many gave at least some of the blame to Manchin. Others blamed Pritt for mishandling her relations with not only Manchin but much of the party’s establishment. Manchin told me that the state was just changing. “All my union friends who basically had a vast network and a big membership” weren’t “controlling the voters anymore,” he said. “People were just voting more on their personal social agenda.”
The real turning point in Manchin’s career, though, was what came next. Rather than seek further retribution, he made an intense effort to woo Pritt’s backers. That included the unions who had backed Pritt. It also included her campaign manager Michael Plante, who had been behind many of the attacks Manchin so resented (“For Joe Manchin to question anyone’s integrity is like being called ugly by a frog,” Plante had said during the race).
“Mike had this huge filing cabinet of anti-Manchin research,” said Democratic state Del. Barbara Fleischauer. “And I remember him saying, you wouldn’t believe it, Joe Manchin called me today and said, ‘I’m gonna run someday for governor again and I would rather you be on my side than against me.’”
Manchin had hit his ceiling as the factional candidate of business. Rather than be at war with unions, he wanted to assure them that he was someone they could work with — to get them at least willing to live with him. He and Pritt would face off again in 2000, in the Democratic primary for secretary of state. But Pritt had been discredited by her general election defeat, and that time, Manchin landed some union endorsements. He won the primary, and then the general election, handily. His comeback had begun.
A changing state
Back when Manchin first entered West Virginia politics, he did so as a Democrat. That was no surprise — it was the party of his relatives who were in politics. But more broadly, the Democratic Party was by far the state’s dominant party. Though West Virginia’s roots were with the party of Lincoln (it was first established as a state during the Civil War when it broke away from secessionist Virginia), Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal cemented the state’s Democratic loyalties for, it would turn out, the rest of the century.
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Bettmann Collection/Getty Images
On the presidential level, the state was solidly Democratic except in the biggest national landslides (West Virginia was even one of just 10 states to vote for Michael Dukakis in 1988). Democrats usually won the governorship and other state offices. In the state legislature, both chambers remained in Democratic hands after 1933 for an astonishing 82 years. And both US senators from West Virginia were Democrats from 1959 until 2015.
Because Democrats were close to the only game in town, the Democratic Party was a big tent. There was a liberal strain of West Virginia Democratic politicians, a conservative strain, and many who were purely mercenary or careerist — but when the Democratic factions were united, they clearly had the numbers to win.
In 2000, the same year Manchin was elected secretary of state, it was obvious things were changing. Though Bill Clinton had won the state handily in the previous cycle, new Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore lost the state by 6 percentage points, with Gore’s environmentalism being generally pegged as the reason. (If Gore had won West Virginia, the contested outcome in Florida would have been irrelevant, and he would have become president.)
Gore’s defeat was not, it turned out, a fluke. The national Democratic Party became branded as anti-coal (meaning, in this state, anti-jobs), anti-gun, pro-abortion rights, and the party of socially liberal urbanites and minorities (West Virginia is one of the most rural states in the country and its population is over 90 percent white).
The state also had serious economic problems. “We lost more and more mining jobs, more and more factories, more and more of the blue-collar unions started decreasing and decreasing,” said Doug Skaff, minority leader of the House of Delegates. Every subsequent Democratic presidential candidate has lost West Virginia by double digits, with Hillary Clinton’s gruesome 42-point defeat in 2016 being the worst.
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The state Democratic Party stuck around long past 2000, and it came to be a party defined by Joe Manchin. Gov. Bob Wise’s popularity fell due to economic troubles and news of an extramarital affair he’d had with a state employee, and Manchin decided to primary him in 2003. Wise then decided not to run again after all, clearing the way for easy Manchin wins in both the 2004 primary and the general election. He had, improbably, become the “unity” candidate.
Plante, the strategist who had run Charlotte Pritt’s 1996 campaign, worked for Manchin this time around. Most unions, too, joined the team. “Labor, like any successful political group, is going to calculate, ‘Okay, somebody else may be with us 100 percent of the time, but they can’t get elected,’” said Plante. “West Virginia had begun its shift to the right, and they wanted to make sure they had a seat at the table.”
As for Manchin, he wasn’t sitting pretty. “This state is not going to revert back to people voting blindly for Democrats,” Manchin told the New York Times in November 2004, in the wake of Kerry’s defeat. “We’re going to have to earn their votes. And if we don’t, we’ll continue to get picked off one by one.”
“You’re kinda king when you’re governor”
Manchin’s strategy to defy the partisan trends in West Virginia mixed canny political branding and image management, legislative dealmaking, and old-fashioned retail politics.
“Joe Manchin is the most talented politician I’ve interacted with personally,” said Patrick Hickey, a former political science professor at West Virginia University. “I think he has the Bill Clinton skill, where he makes you feel like he’s listening.”
And over a nearly four-decade political career, a whole lot of people in this small state have interacted with Manchin personally. (“Everybody knows everybody,” several West Virginians I interviewed told me.) “I think there’s very few people around the state who haven’t seen or met Joe Manchin in some capacity,” Hickey added.
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As governor, Manchin was in his element. “He utilized that position to the fullest. He was involved in almost everything,” said Skaff. ”I don’t know when he slept. I’d see him walking up and down the boulevard in his full suit, slicked-back hair, tennis shoes on, on the cellphone. That’s how he got his exercise in. He’d walk two and a half miles down the boulevard from downtown Charleston to the statehouse with a state trooper in front of him.”
He was particularly engaged when working with the body he used to be a part of, the state legislature. “Manchin would arrive early to work and watch security cameras so that he knew when key legislators arrived. Then he would drop by their offices,” Christopher Regan, a former vice chair of the state Democratic Party, recently wrote in the Atlantic. Previous governors had put up a tent outside the governor’s mansion for special events every so often, but Manchin just left his tent up indefinitely, the better to host constant gatherings.
“You’re kinda king when you’re governor,” said Fleischauer. “He enjoyed that a whole lot.”
Manchin’s model of legislating was to bring every interest to the table and come up with something that they could all live with. It’s a style that usually entails accommodating, rather than confronting, powerful entities. His two biggest policy changes were finally passing his long-sought privatization of the state’s troubled workers’ compensation system, and phasing out the state’s regressive tax on food.
He was keenly interested in being seen as doing a whole lot, and frequently touted a binder full of his plans. “As governor, he had a bill for every problem that reached the top of public consciousness in West Virginia, no matter which way the issue leaned,” Regan wrote. He added: “In retrospect, few if any of these high-profile bills changed much in the state. But regardless of whether the end result was progress, Manchin was always in motion.” West Virginia’s woes may have been too big for any governor to solve, but the reality is that its economic stagnation has continued and its population has kept dropping.
Yet Manchin continued to be well-liked and was perceived as doing a good job. He could survive scandals that might sink a lesser politician, such as the news that his daughter Heather Bresch, an executive at Mylan, a generic drug company founded in the state, had been improperly granted a business degree from West Virginia University without completing the necessary credits. Administrators made a ham-handed effort to cover this up, and critics noted that WVU’s president was a Manchin family friend and former lobbyist for Mylan — everybody knew everybody. Manchin maintained that this was a mix-up and was the university’s fault.
The story had no impact on Manchin’s political fortunes — later in 2008, he won a second term by a 44-point landslide, despite Barack Obama’s solid defeat in the state at the top of the ticket. Bresch would later rise to become Mylan’s CEO and oversee enormously controversial price increases for EpiPens.
Manchin’s next step became clear in 2010, when the state’s longtime senior US senator, Robert C. Byrd, died at age 92. In his younger years Byrd had led a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and filibustered to try and block the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But he’d since become a veritable Senate institution, leading the chamber’s Democrats throughout the Carter and Reagan presidencies, and spending two decades as the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.
In Washington, Byrd took on the mantle of defender of the Senate’s rules and traditions, including the filibuster — the rule governing what can and can’t be passed through budget reconciliation is named after him. In West Virginia, though, Byrd was most known for the scads of federally funded projects he stamped his name on all over the state.
Manchin appointed a 36-year-old former aide to keep Byrd’s seat warm for him, as he prepared to run himself. “He ran for Senate very begrudgingly,” said Jefrey Pollock, a political strategist who has worked for Manchin for nearly two decades. “He didn’t want to be a senator; he loved being governor. But he knew when Byrd died that he was the only person who could realistically carry on the Democratic legacy of Byrd in the Senate.” (Others in the state believed Manchin had been eyeing the seat for some time.)
It was already clear that the 2010 midterms would be difficult for Democrats, with high unemployment and backlash to President Obama’s agenda. But Manchin insisted he wouldn’t be a typical Democrat — touting his National Rifle Association endorsement, vowing to repeal “the bad parts of Obamacare,” and airing an ad in which he shot the party’s climate change bill with a rifle. And, as Democrats around the country went down in flames in what Obama would dub a “shellacking,” Manchin won by 10 points.
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Yet some speculate that the Senate was a rung below another once-held ambition. When Manchin’s governorship began, after all, the most recent Democratic president had been a governor of a small Southern state, and the Democratic president before him had been the governor of a medium Southern state. Some West Virginians believed then that Manchin had the talent and the drive to follow in Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s footsteps.
The 2008 rise of Barack Obama had shattered Democrats’ conventional wisdom about just who is “electable,” though, and the party’s continued shift to the left made it unthinkable that Manchin would ever be its presidential nominee — leaving the Senate as the apparent capstone of his career.
Who is Joe Manchin with when it counts?
Because he had won a special election, Manchin got to join the Senate in November 2010, for a lame-duck session in which the defeated Democrats still held the House and 58 Senate votes. And he quickly made clear he would be on the party’s right flank.
The White House wanted a vote on the DREAM Act, a bill to provide a path to legal status for millions of unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the US as minors. Since three Republicans supported the bill, it could have passed if 57 of the 58 Democrats joined them. But five Democrats voted no, and Manchin made clear he would have been a sixth (though he missed the vote). That meant only 55 senators were in favor of the bill, so the DREAM Act was filibustered to death.
Until this year, that was Manchin’s only brief brush with a Democratic-controlled Congress. For the next decade, Republicans either controlled the House, the Senate, or both, effectively making major progressive bills dead in the water.
In that time, Manchin racked up easily the most conservative voting record of any Senate Democrat. The catch, though, is that the size of the various Senate majorities in this period meant that his vote alone almost never made a difference. Any legislation had to pass with 60 Senate votes and the sign-on of the House (which Republicans controlled until 2019). Nominees also needed 60 votes until Democrats used the nuclear option in late 2013, and Republicans took over the Senate the following year.
By the time President Donald Trump was in office, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had concluded that Manchin’s moderation was situational. That is, if Republicans ever really needed his vote, they were highly unlikely to get it. According to an account from former Trump White House aide Cliff Sims, McConnell told Trump in early 2017 that Manchin would “never be with us when it counts” — and vowed to “crush him like a grape” in the 2018 midterms.
A page on Manchin’s Senate website about legislation still blares the headline: “Senator Manchin Votes with President Trump,” and Manchin would indeed vote for over 100 Trump nominees in ensuing years. Yet these votes would be exclusively cast for nominees who had enough votes to pass without Manchin’s support. They weren’t decisive.
There was, however, one major Senate issue where Manchin could have personally changed the outcome — Republicans’ effort to repeal Obamacare, which surprisingly failed by a single vote in 2017, due to three Republican defections. Manchin voted no, with the rest of his party. As his rationale, he blamed Republicans’ lack of bipartisanship. And when running for reelection the following year, he aired an ad showing him shooting a new document with his rifle — a GOP lawsuit against Obamacare, backed by his opponent.
The other high-stakes battle where Manchin was closely watched involved the fate of Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who in October 2018 was under fire due to allegations of sexual assault from his youth. Republicans had a slim 51-vote majority and they’d lost the vote of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). They could only afford to lose one more Republican — unless, of course, a Democrat broke ranks. As pressure from both sides built, and Manchin’s reelection the following month drew nearer, he stayed mum on his plans.
But Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) threw Manchin a lifeline when she announced in a floor speech that she’d support Kavanaugh, making clear his confirmation was assured. Just minutes later, Manchin blasted out a press release stating his position: He’d also vote yes. We may never know for sure if Manchin would have been the decisive vote to confirm Kavanaugh — but we know he was happy to jump on board once Kavanaugh already had the votes. Afterward, when asked by a reporter if there was still a place in the Democratic Party for him, Manchin responded: “I’m just a good ol’ West Virginian.”
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There was indeed still a place in the party, and the Senate, for him. Though Democrats lost Senate seats in red states like North Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana in 2018, Manchin bucked the trend again, eking out a 3-point victory. After he won, he dropped off a jar of West Virginia “crushed grapes” at McConnell’s office.
Is there always a deal to be made?
Senate influence isn’t measured just in being the decisive vote. Indeed, Manchin’s own main goal is close to the opposite of that — he wants to create broad consensus around legislation. Skaff, the leader of the West Virginia House’s Democratic minority, told me he first met Manchin about 20 years ago, when Skaff was student body president at West Virginia University, and Manchin shared his advice about politics. “This is what stuck with me. He said, ‘There is always, always, a deal to be made. Compromise is the key,’” Skaff said.
But certain issues are so polarized between the parties that legislative action really does seem impossible. For instance, Manchin stuck out his neck out on gun control in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, crafting a compromise bill with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) to require background checks at gun shows and for internet gun sales. Even this limited measure was vociferously opposed by the NRA and fell well short of 60 Senate votes. Other issues, such as immigration and voting reform, appear similarly fraught.
When deals do get done, the cost of making everyone happy is often doing less — dropping or watering down some provisions, and accommodating interests rather than confronting them. To progressives who think the country needs major changes, that’s frustrating. Manchin doesn’t share that worldview. “I think there’s more people that believe like I believe,” he said. “That the moderate middle, a moderate governing function, is the way to go.”
Furthermore, the popular narrative of a gridlocked, do-nothing Congress has been complicated as of late, in the eyes of Princeton political scientist Frances Lee. “I would really like to put to rest this idea that the current Congress is gridlocked after 2020. That was an amazing year, a transformative year,” she said. Most prominently, there was the CARES Act, the vast pandemic relief measure that shelled out hundreds of billions in stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, and aid to businesses. But the last Congress did a good deal more with relatively little public attention, such as creating paid parental leave for federal employees, setting limits on surprise medical billing, and raising the minimum age for tobacco purchases to 21.
Manchin racked up his own bipartisan victories during this period. For years he’d been trying to rescue a pension fund for around 100,000 retired coal miners, but McConnell wouldn’t hold a vote on his bill. Then, in late 2019, McConnell jumped on board, saying new coal company bankruptcies had convinced him action was necessary, but perhaps motivated by his own looming reelection. There was a price: A provision to tax coal companies to fund benefits for black lung sufferers was dropped to get GOP support. The pension rescue made it into Congress’s year-end spending package and became law.
With then-Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), Manchin crafted the Great American Outdoors Act, which allotted billions for deferred national park repair and federal conservation programs. After it passed, one expert called it “the biggest land conservation legislation in a generation.” (Republicans may have allowed it to pass in an attempt to save Gardner’s reelection and the GOP’s Senate majority, though he lost.)
Manchin also worked with Murkowski, then his Republican counterpart atop the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, on Congress’s first comprehensive energy bill in over a decade. Bipartisan compromise meant ditching some Democratic priorities, such as environmental justice provisions, and Manchin was naturally inclined to make sure states with fossil fuel jobs were treated well. They modified their bill to gain support, with 70 senators getting something they wanted. “We are the only committee still working and getting something done,” Manchin said in September. Yet the bill wasn’t brought to a vote, due to a fear that Trump would veto it because of his personal dislike for Murkowski.
After the November election, in Manchin’s recounting, he called Collins (whom he had endorsed and calls a friend) to congratulate her on her victory — and to say the moderates needed to get together to jump-start stalled talks on a new Covid-19 relief bill. A group of eight senators soon convened at Murkowski’s house to do that, and succeeded. Once a Covid-19 deal was headed toward passage, Manchin and Murkowski locked down sufficient support to get their energy deal thrown into Congress’s year-end package, and Trump signed the whole thing into law.
In explaining these successes, Manchin’s allies tout the power of compromise and personal relationships (when he’s in Washington, he frequently invites senators over to the houseboat where he lives, and he’s vowed never to campaign against a fellow incumbent). Still, the types of deals that are achievable tend to be those that help politically sympathetic people or are friendly to industries. They also came while Republicans were desperately trying to retain control of the Senate. Now in the minority, the GOP could well revert to a mode of obstruction, to try to deny Democrats and Biden successes, in hopes voters would punish the incumbent party at the midterms.
When I asked about that possibility, Manchin responded, “That is so wrong.” He acknowledges McConnell’s infamous 2010 comment that his top priority was making Obama a one-term president, but says, “I don’t think that can be repeated, or that people would stand for it, or even that the Republican caucus would adhere to that again.”
“I’m just the product of my environment”
The achievement of Manchin managing to keep his seat in the modern Senate is, if anything, underestimated. Polarization and the nationalization of politics has made ticket-splitting quite rare: Currently, only six of 100 senators represent seats the other party’s presidential nominee won in 2020. Five of them represent seats the other party won by 16 points or less. Manchin is in another league: Trump won his state by nearly 39 points. By any reckoning, Democrats are incredibly lucky to have this seat at all, and they’ll be highly unlikely to keep it once he leaves the scene.
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While Manchin has been in the Senate defying the partisan tide, the remainder of the West Virginia Democratic Party has been swept away. Republicans’ 2014 midterm landslide ended Democrats’ eight-decade run controlling the state legislature. In 2016, Manchin encouraged wealthy businessman Jim Justice to run for governor as a Democrat. Justice won, but then dramatically switched parties the following year. Now every statewide office and the whole congressional delegation is in Republican hands, except for Manchin’s Senate seat. “I’m the last person standing,” he says.
Manchin’s future is unclear. His next reelection would be in 2024, when he’d be 77 years old. His victory in 2018 was narrow, and he likely benefited from the fact that it wasn’t a presidential year, considering the increased rarity of ticket-splitting. There is occasionally talk that he could run for governor again (that election would also be in 2024), but he recently sounded unlikely to do it. His legacy is likely on his mind.
That legacy will in large part be shaped by what happens in Congress under the Biden administration. For the first time in a decade, Democrats have unified control of government, which theoretically gives them a rare opportunity to pass new progressive laws on a party-line basis. But in practice, the 60-vote threshold to advance legislation past the filibuster dramatically limits what they can do with their party alone (except, again, for budget reconciliation, a process that comes with restrictions and that Manchin has voiced skepticism about using again).
To the immense frustration of progressive activists, Manchin has insisted that this filibuster must stay. He is not the only Senate Democrat with this view — Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is with him prominently, as are others more quietly. But in March, Manchin perhaps inadvertently gave reformers hope with a series of ambiguous and misinterpreted comments about a rules tweak he could support (requiring filibustering senators to talk on the Senate floor). So he tried to quash those hopes with his Washington Post op-ed in early April.
Some filibuster reformers hope that, as the year goes on, the reality of Republican obstruction will become clear to Manchin and he’ll be driven to change his mind — that Senate rules will in the end be just as negotiable to him as the details of Biden’s stimulus bill. For instance, reformers hoped a GOP filibuster of Democrats’ big voting rights bill, the For the People Act, could spur holdout senators to change the rules to pass it, because it’s so important.
Manchin recoils at the very idea. “How in the world could you, with the tension we have right now, allow a voting bill to restructure the voting of America on a partisan line?” he asked. He says that 20 to 25 percent of the public already doesn’t trust the system and that a party-line overhaul would “guarantee” that number would increase, leading to more “anarchy” like that at the Capitol on January 6. He added: “I just believe with all my heart and soul that’s what would happen, and I’m not going to be part of it.”
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The senator is already on record opposing a $15-an-hour minimum wage, which he says “just doesn’t work economically” for rural areas. But more than that, he thinks the lack of action on a minimum wage increase is largely the fault of left-wing Democratic senators who are “philosophically or ideologically stuck on 15.” He says he has Republican support to increase the wage from $7.25 to $11, and that he “can’t figure out” why Democrats “won’t take a victory.”
More broadly, Manchin acknowledges that he has a great deal of power in the 50-50 Senate — and he knows there’s a very good chance he won’t retain that power after the 2022 midterms. So he wants to use the opportunity of this “moment in time,” as he calls it, to push the Senate toward bipartisanship rather than away from it.
He tends to wax loquacious on the “brilliance” of the country’s founders in creating the Senate to cool the passions of the House. The problem here is that the founders didn’t actually have anything to do with the filibuster, which was created by accident, and which only became so commonly used in recent decades. Regardless, Manchin now says the filibuster is essential to what he views as the Senate’s moderating function, and insists he will not be “that one vote that would basically destroy it.”
The bigger picture is that Manchin fundamentally disagrees with progressives that the major problem facing the country is Republican extremism. He thinks Democrats are part of the problem, too. He wants his party to really try to work with Republicans, and believes that won’t happen unless they are forced to do so because of the filibuster. And, he told me, he thinks his strategy of taking filibuster reform off the table is already working — to change his own party’s behavior. “Because they know I’m adamant about that,” he said, “there have been more talks of compromise now.”
Biden knows how important Manchin is to his agenda, and his approach to the senator has focused on carrots, not sticks. It’s worked well so far — Manchin has backed nearly all of Biden’s nominees to date, though he scuttled Neera Tanden’s Office of Management and Budget confirmation, saying it was because of her “overly partisan” tweets. He also voted for progressive Rep. Deb Haaland to head the Interior Department despite some skepticism, but got Biden to drop his initial pick for deputy secretary of the department in favor of a more fossil fuel-friendly choice.
Manchin has said he’s spoken to Biden five to seven times this year, telling the Hill that “we have a great relationship.” It’s not just phone calls — in late March, Biden announced he would nominate Manchin’s wife, Gayle Conelly Manchin, to serve as federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission. Carrots, not sticks.
Yet with Manchin seeming so unlikely to back rules reform, some progressives, at least in the online realm, have mused that Democratic leaders should consider a tougher response — say, taking away his committee chair. Such tactics are reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s approach to disciplining moderate Republicans in the last 50-50 Senate, controlled by the GOP in 2001. The ultimate result was that Sen. James Jeffords (R-VT), believing the administration had acted high-handedly and arrogantly toward him, announced he’d switch parties, and control of the Senate, to the Democrats that May.
There are reasons to doubt Manchin would do the same, such as his four decades of history in the Democratic Party, his often-frosty relationship with McConnell, and his votes to remove Trump from office (which make a continued electoral career in the GOP unlikely). Of course, that assumes Manchin continues to feel well-treated by Democratic leaders. If they went to war against him, well, remember Charlotte Pritt. Manchin may be a conciliator, but he’s no pushover.
When I asked him about a party switch, though, Manchin said, “I’ve never considered it from that standpoint because I know I can change more from where I’m at. And I still believe in the principles of the Democratic Party that I grew up with.”
Those principles, he said, are that while “everyone should have a helping hand” with “the basic necessities of life,” everyone should also “contribute.” He cited his grandmother, Mama Kay, who would open her home to the homeless and the hungry, but who also set rules: “you couldn’t cuss, you couldn’t drink, and you had to work.”
“You want to continue to send checks and give everything away continuously, that’s not who I am,” he continued. “Not the way I was raised.”
“I’m just the product of my environment. I’m sorry if you don’t like it. It’s who I am.”
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