Citing Manchin is kind of absurd when Manchin was a dinosaur and a holdover from a time when Democrats were dominant in West Virginia politics. As late as the early Obama era, Democrats were still running up the score in WV non-Presidential elections. It’s not that Joe Manchin was substantially different than Obama where it counted, it’s that WV had a ton of ancestral Democrats whose voting patterns were yet to solidify behind Republicans.
Sure, there are Manchin-esque candidates that *may* be better for heavily Republican states, but they’re still fighting an uphill battle. See Tester, Brown, et. al.
The overall better option is to embrace an agenda that shows Democrats can govern while building from the ground up utilizing the new Democratic voter base who will turn out to vote on three new books to add to the local library.
FroggyHarley on
> Giving up on ideological commitments that make it borderline impossible to win the Senate isn’t really giving up on anything, because without the Senate, you have nothing.
By that logic we should just run Republicans under the Democrat banner so we can congratulate ourselves for winning a majority in the Senate.
Doesn’t matter if those Joe Manchin-ites threaten to block every bill if it doesn’t include subsidies for coal-powered data centers or cuts to social spending under the guise of “fiscal responsibility.” At least we got a majority, right?
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Citing Manchin is kind of absurd when Manchin was a dinosaur and a holdover from a time when Democrats were dominant in West Virginia politics. As late as the early Obama era, Democrats were still running up the score in WV non-Presidential elections. It’s not that Joe Manchin was substantially different than Obama where it counted, it’s that WV had a ton of ancestral Democrats whose voting patterns were yet to solidify behind Republicans.
Sure, there are Manchin-esque candidates that *may* be better for heavily Republican states, but they’re still fighting an uphill battle. See Tester, Brown, et. al.
The overall better option is to embrace an agenda that shows Democrats can govern while building from the ground up utilizing the new Democratic voter base who will turn out to vote on three new books to add to the local library.
> Giving up on ideological commitments that make it borderline impossible to win the Senate isn’t really giving up on anything, because without the Senate, you have nothing.
By that logic we should just run Republicans under the Democrat banner so we can congratulate ourselves for winning a majority in the Senate.
Doesn’t matter if those Joe Manchin-ites threaten to block every bill if it doesn’t include subsidies for coal-powered data centers or cuts to social spending under the guise of “fiscal responsibility.” At least we got a majority, right?