Thoughts on Joe Manchin's Retirement

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV)

Few men have had a stranglehold on the American political system in the past five years more than Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who this week announced that he will retire from the Senate (though, as we'll get into in a second, not necessarily from public life).  Manchin's exit from Congress is a big deal, and it brings about a lot of mixed emotions for Democrats who have had to put up with his chaos for years, particularly during the first two years of the Biden administration.  It felt weird not to at least mention this retirement even if, as I'll point out below, I don't think it matters much from an electoral standpoint in 2024 one way or the other.

First off, let's talk Joe Manchin.  It's worth noting that when Joe Manchin was elected to the Senate in 2010, he wasn't the anomaly that he is now.  In 2010, Democrats would regularly win Senate races in red states.  He joined people like Ben Nelson (NE), Mary Landrieu (LA), Mark Pryor (AR), Mark Begich (AK), Tim Johnson (SD), & Kent Conrad (ND) when he was elected to Congress, all of them moderate Democrats from states that George W. Bush & John McCain had taken victory laps in.  Manchin has been in public life longer than most people (including me, which is getting harder to say about politicians) have been alive, first serving in the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1982 when West Virginia was among the most reliable Democratic states in the nation (lest we forget, Michael Dukakis lost California, Illinois, & Vermont in 1988, but not West Virginia).  

He will leave the Senate, though, as a relic of a different era.  No Democratic senator has been able to win a state as red as him in the past six years.  West Virginia has the second-strongest Cook PVI of any state for the Republicans, with an R+22 ranking...there is literally no state in the Union that has a Democratic PVI that strong.  Manchin holding office is so commonplace to us now that we don't really think about how bizarre it is, as it's basically the equivalent of a Republican holding a House seat in Portland, Oregon or Boys Town in Chicago.  Manchin is frequently compared to people like Jon Tester or Susan Collins, but in reality-he's the rarest of unicorns.

And a unicorn that, despite Democrats' complaints about him through the years, was certainly worth the trouble.  Manchin gets such ire that some Democrats online were saying "good riddance" about his retirement announcement, but it's hard to think of Manchin as anything other than a blessing for the party given that he provided the 50th, majority-building vote in the Senate during the first two years of Biden's tenure.  That vote confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson, and it passed landmark pieces of legislation.  Through the Inflation Reduction Act, he cast the deciding vote on the single most important piece of climate change legislation in the history of the planet, and he was also the deciding vote on the American Rescue Plan Act, which allowed Joe Biden to largely end the pandemic in the United States with little issue from Republican interference.  I'll own it-I wish he was more liberal, but Democrats across the country (and the world as a collective) should be incredibly grateful that Joe Manchin won in 2018, and I am genuinely sad that he won't get another term in office, no matter how much he pissed me off.

Manchin's retirement was greeted by bombastic headlines about how this hurt Democrats' chances in the Senate next year, but to be honest-that's kind of bullshit.  Manchin was never going to win next year.  This was not the equivalent of, say, Jon Tester retiring, where a Tossup seat goes to Safe R...this is more like going from Likely R to Safe R.  No realistic path through the Senate was ever going to involve another term for Manchin, and this frees up both sides to spend more money on the races that matter in Ohio & Montana, and for the DSCC to monitor expensive contests in Texas & Florida in case one of them starts to break into tossup territory.  The Democrats were underdogs to win a Senate majority last week...they remain that way with Manchin out of the way.

What I will say before I go, though, is that Manchin's retirement comes with a catch.  For months, the No Labels movement has publicly courted the West Virginia senator to be their nominee, and Manchin has seemed interested.  He's indicated that he'll be on a public listening tour.  If he does run, a lot of the nice things I said about him go out the window, as his legacy will be tarnished (hurting Biden's reelection chances and destroying American democracy best any good he did).  I think (and hope) that this is just the last hurrah of a man with an ego much larger than his state, trying to get just a few more moments in the spotlight.  My hunch is that if he holds a major role in the future, it'd likely be as West Virginia University's president (a position he has long coveted, and something Joe Biden would be smart to push Gov. Jim Justice to appoint Manchin to at the end of his current term) or he could have pretty much any ambassadorial post he wanted in a Biden second term (again, Biden should reach out), but watch this space if he decides to be a pain in the ass one last time.