On a frosty night in February, Joe Manchin III, the senior senator from West Virginia, invited a few colleagues over for dinner aboard the houseboat he docks on the Potomac. In the past, opponents have sought to highlight the vessel for political effect; a 2018 advertisement by the National Republican Senatorial Committee called it a “$700,000 D.C. luxury yacht.” (In response, Manchin’s office reported that he bought it, used, for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.) The boat—which he named Almost Heaven, after John Denver’s description of West Virginia in “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—resembles a small ferry; it is sixty-five feet long and boxy, with tinted windows. It serves as a residence on the nights he is in Washington, but also as a political prop. For voters who dislike the government, it allows Manchin, a seventy-three-year-old Democrat in his third term, to say that he could weigh anchor and escape anytime; for friends in politics, it provides an offshore venue for the kind of casual evening that Manchin considers vital to politics.
On this occasion, Manchin and his wife, Gayle, were joined by Senators Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine—who, along with Manchin, occupy a small island of centrists in a fiercely divided Congress. Collins told me recently, “It’s increasingly a lonely place to be.” Hours earlier, in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, Collins had been one of seven Republicans who joined Democrats in pronouncing him guilty. But the final tally was 57-43, ten votes short of conviction. To those who had hoped that the defiling of the Capitol and the assault on police would at last break Trump’s grip on his party, the result was dismal.
On board, Manchin’s guests ate Gayle’s spaghetti and meatballs, while he fixed the drinks. After a few hours, Tester started making his way home to his apartment across town, but as he went down the gangplank he found that it had become coated with ice. “My feet go to the ceiling,” he recalled recently. Manchin reached out to grab him, at which point he also fell. Both men started sliding. Tester’s foot hit the water. “I was looking for anything to grab,” he said. “I finally got a piece of metal and stopped. Joe did, too.” Tester was bleeding from his left hand; he asked Manchin if he was all right. “He says, ‘I think I broke my thumb.’ ” (Doctors put Manchin in a brace, but he took it off after a few weeks.)
In another year, the prospect of losing two Democratic senators overboard in an ice storm might be greeted with a certain wry resignation among Washington’s political class. This year, it inspires panic, at least among Democrats: in a 50-50 Senate, the Party’s agenda is only one vote—or one heartbeat—from oblivion. Manchin, in particular, holds extraordinary power. As perhaps the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, he often breaks from the Party, which gives him a de-facto veto over a large swath of the Administration’s agenda. In the first months of Joe Biden’s Presidency, Manchin tanked the nomination of Neera Tanden as budget director (he disapproved of her tweets), opposed raising the corporate tax rate to twenty-eight per cent (he preferred twenty-five per cent), and single-handedly narrowed unemployment benefits in a covid-relief bill. Over and over, Manchin said that he was driven by a fundamental faith in bipartisanship, a belief that Democrats could and must find Republican support for their legislation—a posture so at odds with the present hostilities in Washington that it evoked a man hoisting his glass for a toast while his guests lunged at one another with steak knives.
Manchin’s sudden clout, after an unremarkable decade in national politics, has made him the subject of almost ludicrous attention. He is stalked by the political press, his comments are parsed for subtle variations, and he is courted by powerful figures on both the right and the left. On another recent evening aboard the boat, he was dining with Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, when President Biden called. “He says, ‘When are you inviting me out there?’ ” Manchin told me. “I said, ‘We’re figuring out how to get you in by water. They’ll never know you came.’ ”
Biden and his advisers were engaged in a transparent campaign to win Manchin’s support. The last time Democrats held the White House, he was not much of a priority; President Barack Obama called him three times in eight years. In Biden’s first few months, he talked or met with Manchin at least half a dozen times. Biden took to calling him Jo-Jo, Manchin said, adding, “I don’t know where he came up with that.” But he appreciated that the President was not pressuring him much to adhere to the party line: “He’ll say, ‘Listen, I’ll never ask you to vote against your conviction.’ I said, ‘I know that, and I appreciate it.’ He just said, ‘If you can help me, help me,’ and I said, ‘I’ll help you where I can,’ and I said, ‘When I can’t . . . ’ ” Manchin changed tack. “I’m begging him, ‘We’ve got to start doing some things bipartisan.’ ”
Biden and Manchin have obvious points in common—two white, Catholic Joes, in their seventies, both former football players who take pride in their working-class roots, long after becoming wealthy. More deeply, each has less regard for ideology than for the hands-on horse-trading of Congress. In Biden’s 2017 book, “Promise Me, Dad,” he wrote, “At bottom, politics depends on trust, and unless you can establish a personal relationship, it’s awfully hard to build trust.” Manchin, too, is a heavy schmoozer, even by the standards of his profession. Hoppy Kercheval, the host of an influential political radio show in West Virginia, told me, “I’ve talked to him a thousand times, and there have been times where I think, I’ve got to get off the phone. He’s wearing me out.” Manchin has distributed his personal cell-phone number so widely that his staff has pleaded with him to get a new one. (He refuses.)
To many on the left, Manchin is an impediment to history, spouting bromides about patience and tradition at a moment when partisan attempts to curtail access to voting could undermine the legitimacy of free elections. (In May, a column in Esquire was headlined “In the Fight to Save Democracy, Joe Manchin Is Neville Chamberlain.”) Adam Jentleson, a progressive political strategist and a former Senate staffer, told me, “It’s like there’s a brain rot that senators get that comes from too many Sunday shows, too many conversations with comfortable people who think they’re living in a ‘West Wing’ episode.” He continued, “Manchin cutting a deal with Susan Collins is not going to bring people together. The end result will actually be that we pass much weaker solutions than we could if he was more realistic about the world he lived in.” In June, Manchin rendered the most controversial decision of his career: he vowed to oppose the Democrats’ signature election-reform bill, the For the People Act, because it lacked Republican support, and he refused to modify the filibuster rule, the sixty-vote threshold that would prevent his party from passing it alone. The Reverend Dr. William Barber II, the civil-rights activist and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, immediately announced plans for a Moral March on Manchin in Charleston, the state capitol, and tweeted that Manchin’s position was “wrong, constitutionally inconsistent, historically inaccurate, morally indefensible, economically insane, and politically unacceptable.”
Manchin’s feud with progressive Democrats centers on a basic difference in their assessment of the Republican Party. To many of his colleagues, the G.O.P. has become an overt enemy of democracy, by perpetuating Trump’s lies about his loss in 2020 and rewriting state laws in ways that could allow them to overturn future elections. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has stated plainly, “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” an echo of his comment, in 2010, that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.” McConnell, in that view, will never coöperate, because doing so could allow Democrats to win the next elections by claiming policy achievements and a breakthrough in partisan gridlock. Harry Reid, a senator from Nevada for three decades and the Democratic Senate Majority Leader from 2007 to 2015, told me that Manchin underestimates the change in D.C. culture. “We’ve never had it like this before,” he said. “When Lyndon Johnson was Majority Leader for six years, he overcame two filibusters. In my first six years as Leader, I had to face and overcome more than a hundred filibusters. I think that you cannot expect the Senate to be a place where it’s kind of ‘Kumbaya,’ where you hold hands and sing.”
But, when Manchin looks at today’s Republican Party, he sees, almost literally, his neighbors and friends. Since 2000, the congressional delegation of West Virginia has gone from all Democrats to all Republicans—except for him. The state has voted for a Republican in each of the past six Presidential elections, and in 2014 the state legislature flipped to Republican control for the first time since 1931. On January 6th, when word circulated on the Senate floor that Trump supporters had stormed the Capitol, Manchin did not initially assume the worst. “I’ve always been for a good protest,” he recalled. “My instinct was, Let them in! They’re raising all kinds of hell and hollering. Let them in! Let’s talk!” Soon, he glimpsed the horror of it—“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine our form of government being attacked,” he said—and, during the impeachment trial, he voted to convict. But Manchin never broke faith with the Republican Party, and he was determined to work with it again.
If politics is the art of the possible, Manchin’s likes and dislikes may determine what is possible for the Democrats—on police reform, gun safety, expansions of labor and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants—in the two crucial years before the midterm elections, when they risk losing control of Congress. Whether or not his peers like it, his unease with some key elements of the progressive agenda reflects the views of millions of Americans, not only people like him—what we might call Tommy Bahama Democrats, the prosperous boomers who look askance at Trump-supporting friends but have no plans to stop inviting them for dinner—but also rural voters who feel estranged from the Democratic Party. Manchin’s power is forcing Democrats to expand their focus on systemic inequities to encompass places like West Virginia, where substandard schools, high poverty, and distrust of government helped fuel radical conservatism. In that sense, Manchin’s innate conservatism also sets boundaries around the Party’s instincts, forestalling transformative changes that could drive away moderate voters in 2022 and 2024.
In the awkward marriage between Manchin and the Democratic Party, neither side hides its ambivalence. In April, on “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah likened Manchin to “that annoying kid on your block who had a pool. Yeah, he hogged all the noodles and wouldn’t let anyone use the diving board, but without him there’s no pool party.” The relationship rests on a basic fact of political arithmetic: in a state that Biden lost by thirty-nine points, Manchin has won six straight elections. As much as progressives condemn his resistance, he is all that stands between them and a Republican Senate majority. On June 1st, even as Manchin was digging in against many of his party’s priorities, Richard Durbin, of Illinois, the second-ranked Democrat in the Senate, told a reporter, “I say a prayer every morning and evening for Joe Manchin.”
As a Democrat often surrounded by conservatives, Manchin leans hard on the stagecraft of patriotism. When I stopped by his office on Capitol Hill not long ago, he was flanked by desktop statues of eagles in flight, accompanied by two brass lamps adorned with more eagles. While we talked, he illustrated a point by producing a tiny copy of the Constitution from the breast pocket of his suit coat.
Up close, Manchin could be mistaken for a high-priced football coach. He is six feet three, with an aquiline nose, a silver pompadour, and a meaty handshake. Before entering government full time, he worked mostly as a salesman—furniture and carpets, then coal—and you can feel it in his enthusiasm for retail politics. Kercheval, the radio host, told me, “He is very good in crowds. He’s very good one-on-one. It’s Clintonesque. When he’s talking to you, you feel like you’re the only one in the world. And I think, frankly, a lot of it is sincere. When he is talking to some little old lady somewhere, I think he is genuinely interested in what her problems are.” Manchin attributes his social appetite to growing up in a big Italian Appalachian family. “If I didn’t hug and kiss you, I’d get slapped,” he told me. “I didn’t give a shit who you were, I didn’t care what color you were, I’m going to hug and kiss you first, and then find out if we’re related.” Even when Manchin disagrees with people, they generally find him personable. Cecil Roberts, the head of the United Mine Workers of America, told me, “He can give you bad news, and, for a few minutes, you think he gave you good news.”
During his early years in Washington, his fellow-Democrats marvelled at his ability to win in a conservative state. “I thought, I have to see this miracle,” Barbara Boxer, who represented California in the Senate from 1993 to 2017, told me. “It takes a very special personality to overcome the innate negativity toward the other party.” She went on, “Having said all that, he wanted to get on my committee, and I stopped it cold. He was coming there to help coal country, and I was there to help get pollution and carbon out of the air.” Manchin didn’t let the slight affect their relationship, she said: “You would think we would have been at fisticuffs because of that, but he never had a bad word to say.”
The more divided Congress has become, the more Manchin has professed his faith in the power of collegiality. Reviving a long-forgotten Senate tradition, he has vowed never to campaign against an incumbent senator of either party, no matter how much they differ personally or ideologically. He and McConnell have feuded for years, but when McConnell faced a strong Democratic opponent in Amy McGrath, last year, Manchin declined to help her campaign.
In his votes and his comments, Manchin avoids the appearance of being in the full embrace of either party. In late January, hounded by reporters for a clearer signal of whether he would agree to push through a stimulus plan without Republicans, he said, repeatedly, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” He eventually agreed to advance that bill with no Republicans, but in the following months he repeatedly questioned parts of Biden’s agenda. “If he senses that the Democrats are all doing one thing, and the Republicans are going to be aligned on the other side, he doesn’t want to seem like an easy sell,” Brian Fallon, a former aide to Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, told me. Torpedoing Tanden’s nomination, in March, was a natural Manchin move: independent enough to earn approving coverage in conservative media, but not so grave that it would cause a rupture with Democratic leaders.
His constant triangulation makes him mercurial. “What he stands up and says from one caucus lunch to the next doesn’t match up,” a Democratic strategist said, “and he’s not the type of guy that’s going to go home and read a fifty-page briefing book.” In March, Manchin raised the prospect of making the filibuster “a little bit more painful,” by reviving the requirement for the marathon speeches known as the talking filibuster. Progressives rejoiced, but soon he expressed reservations about the idea. “If you have a talking filibuster, basically, you can just wait that one out,” he told me. “It doesn’t really achieve anything.”
In his office, I told him that much of Washington was asking a version of the same question: What does Joe Manchin really want? He flashed an irritated smile. “Can you believe that? It’s like I came here to hold people hostage,” he said. He repeated the question back to me. “What does Joe Manchin want? Son of a bitch—they think that they can spend a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars and that’ll take care of making it right?” He went on, “They want me to change. To agree. I say, No, I’m not going to change.”
Manchin often speaks of remaining true to the terrain that produced him—the town of Farmington, West Virginia (population: 325). “You are who you are because of where you’re raised and how you’re raised and who raised you,” he told me. “Farmington is why I haven’t changed.”
In 1978, the political scientist Richard Fenno, of the University of Rochester, published a landmark study titled “Home Style,” based on observations of eighteen members of the House as they returned to their districts. The book investigated a contradiction that came to be known as Fenno’s paradox: Americans often hate Congress but keep reëlecting their local Congress members. The explanation, he concluded, was that successful politicians develop a “home style”—a set of behaviors that allow them to code-switch, accruing power in Washington while retaining trust back home. These days, Democrats in red states face extra pressure to attend to their home style. Tester, of Montana, told me, “Instead of going home every month, you go home every week. People want to see you. They want to make sure you haven’t ‘gone D.C.’ ”
A certain prickly independence runs deep in West Virginia. Long before it was a state, the mountains of northwestern Virginia attracted small farmers who resented the power and pride of plantation owners in the east. The two sides of the state clashed over taxes, slavery, and respect. In an open letter written in 1861, after Virginia voted to secede, politicians in the western counties questioned why they should put up with the “haughty arrogance and wicked machinations of would-be Eastern Despots.” They broke away from the Confederacy, joining the Union as a state in 1863, and later adopted the motto “Montani semper liberi”—mountaineers are always free.
Joe Manchin’s grandfather was born Giuseppe Mancini, in the southern-Italian region of Calabria. In 1904, when he was three years old, his family immigrated to Farmington, a hill town that straddles the narrow waters of Buffalo Creek, a couple of hours’ drive from Charleston. He started working with his father in a coal mine at eleven, and later opened the Manchin Grocery Store, while serving, at various points, as fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. He and his wife, Kathleen—the matriarch known as Mama Kay—raised five kids and kept everyone close to home. By the time Joe III was growing up, the Manchins had risen in the small-town hierarchy. His father expanded the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets, and turned their home from a two-bedroom apartment above a garage into a six-bedroom house. Marion County, where they lived, was small, dependent on coal, and ninety-five per cent white.
Manchin first encountered politics beyond Farmington through the flamboyant figure he called Uncle Jimmy. A. James Manchin, as constituents knew him, spent half a century in state government, honing a knack for generating attention. He once arranged for a chorus of twelve trumpeters to dignify the opening of a sewage-treatment plant. (Years later, Jimmy said, “There’s still a lot of people in this state that think of A. James Manchin every time they flush their commodes.”) After he became secretary of state, in 1977, he endeared himself to constituents by defending West Virginia against hillbilly stereotypes portrayed on “The Love Boat,” and he handed out hundreds of thousands of honorary certificates and trinkets with the state seal on them. When critics complained that he used his office for self-promotion, he said, “Sure, I’m a showboat, a ham. Well, I’m in government!” Later, serving as West Virginia’s treasurer, he narrowly avoided a career-ending disgrace: in 1987, the state lost nearly three hundred million dollars on Wall Street investments. He was impeached, but he resigned before he could be pushed out; after he spent a decade away from politics, his home county elected him to the state legislature. On his desk in Washington, Joe Manchin keeps a photo of Uncle Jimmy beside his keyboard.
Jimmy exposed his nephew to another influence: during the Democratic primary of 1960, John F. Kennedy, running against Hubert Humphrey, spent weeks crisscrossing West Virginia, in the hope of demonstrating that a Catholic candidate could win in a predominantly Protestant state. His campaign recruited Uncle Jimmy to stump for Kennedy and introduce him at rallies. Joe, who was twelve, met Bobby and Teddy Kennedy in his parents’ kitchen, over a dinner of spaghetti. His father drove Jack Kennedy around in the family’s convertible. Manchin took note of the Kennedys’ powers of image management. “They knew how to come across as real people,” he said. “Hubert was probably more of a real person and had more of a real life than any of them. It didn’t come across as well.”
In 1965, Manchin went to West Virginia University, as a quarterback on a football scholarship. In his freshman year, he met Gayle Conelly; they married in 1967, while still in school, and later had three children, Heather, Joseph, and Brooke. The following year, the Manchins’ life in Farmington changed abruptly: a fire destroyed the family store and killed a salesclerk and three customers, including a child. Manchin left school for most of a year to help rebuild. Nine days after the fire, a series of explosions ripped through a nearby coal mine, killing seventy-eight men, including his mother’s younger brother. The mines withered, and so did the town. Manchin’s sister Paula Llaneza, who still lives in Farmington, told me, “We started losing people. No one came back.”
In 1982, while selling carpets in the family business, Manchin was elected to the state legislature and started moving up as a conservative Democrat. He became a national officer of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative policy group that drafted model bills for state lawmakers. He opposed abortion, appealed to all “able-bodied” recipients of welfare to find work, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, voted to reduce awards in the workers’-compensation system. In 1996, he ran in the primary for the gubernatorial race. The coal-miners’ union distributed T-shirts with his name crossed out. Cecil Roberts, the head of the union, told me, “It wasn’t that he didn’t care about unions. It was just that he was more of a pro-business Democrat in those days. He says that we cost him the election, which is probably true.” After he lost the primary, to a progressive rival named Charlotte Pritt, Manchin did not throw his support behind the Party’s new candidate; on the contrary, he sent letters to influential Democrats accusing her of ignoring the concerns of more conservative members of the Party. She lost the race.
If Manchin wanted to win, it seemed, he would need to expand his base of support beyond the business community. Out of government, he had become a successful coal broker, running a firm called Enersystems. (In his most recent Senate disclosures, he and Gayle reported a net worth of between four million and thirteen million dollars.) In 2001, he became the secretary of state, and, alongside his alliance with businesses, he courted organized labor, declaring that he could find common ground between them. When he ran for governor again, in 2004, he was endorsed by the miners’ union, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and the West Virginia Education Association. Manchin won. Roberts believed that he had learned a lesson. “He included labor in everything that he did,” he said.
As Republicans gained influence in West Virginia, Manchin leaned ever harder on his self-narrative as a unifier. After he was elected governor, a local paper reported that one of his favorite movies was “Dave,” a Washington fairy tale in which an ordinary guy is thrust into the Presidency and ends up healing a divided nation. But, twenty-five years after he turned his back on the 1996 Democratic nominee, some in his party still consider the move a defining reflection of his priorities. Walt Auvil, a member of the West Virginia Democrats’ executive committee, who has tussled with Manchin over the years, said, “The state Democrats never recovered. The state was heading in a Republican direction anyway, but Joe rode that train very eagerly. He didn’t have a principle that says, This is bad, so I should act accordingly.”
In the view of Stephen Smith, a co-founder of WV Can’t Wait, a grassroots progressive group, Manchin represents the “wealthy good-old-boys’ club,” a generation of Democrats and Republicans who thrived as the economy and the social fabric frayed. “He’s been the most powerful lawmaker in West Virginia for twenty years,” Smith said. “And his game is to do what all establishment politicians do—namely, what’s best for him.”
Farmington, today, is less than half the size it was when Manchin was growing up. The family store, like most of the shops downtown, has been gone for years, but its big, bright sign, advertising Papa Joe’s Famous Meats, still hangs on a brick wall beside an empty lot. It’s a nod to local history, in a state that puts a high premium on nostalgia. Robert Rupp, a political-science professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College, told me, “We’ve lived in our house for thirty-one years, but it used to belong to a Mrs. Taylor. And when I die they’re going to say, ‘Robert Rupp lived in Mrs. Taylor’s house.’ ”
People in West Virginia have reason to savor the past. It’s the only state that has fewer people than it had seventy years ago. In April, the Census Bureau reported that West Virginia’s population had dropped another three per cent in the past decade, extending a decline that began in the nineteen-fifties. The loss of population means a loss of federal funding and political power. In 1950, West Virginia had six seats in the U.S. House of Representatives; next year, it will be down to two. The gaps in local infrastructure are profound. Jamie Greene, a teacher at North Marion High School, told me that the pandemic had exposed the scale of residents’ needs. “I had kids who took an A.P. exam last spring in a McDonald’s parking lot, because that was the closest place for them to connect to the Internet,” she said. “They took the test in their car, with their mom sitting next to them. We’ve been talking about extending broadband Internet in West Virginia for years, and it hasn’t happened.”
Auvil, the member of the Democratic executive committee, told me, “We’re fiftieth in the country in percentage of college graduates. We’re one of the oldest states in the country, and we’re the whitest state in the country. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I love the state. I love the people here. My family lives here. But those demographic facts are huge problems.”
At its best, the local sense of history reminds people of their interdependence. Stephanie Cummons, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two, who lives down the block from where Manchin grew up, writes a column about her town for the Times West Virginian, a nearby paper. “We’ve been hit with a lot of tragedy—mine collapses and explosions and floods and different things,” she told me. “But we always take care of our own. And that’s something that you’re taught when you’re a child here. Whoever’s house you were in at suppertime, that’s where you ate.” People had their disagreements, of course, but they had to figure them out eventually—because, she said, “that other person is going to be in the pew beside you in church on Sunday.”
In the most recent election, more than two-thirds of the voters in Manchin’s home town went for Trump, but, unlike in much of the country, people in a tiny town don’t have the luxury of avoiding one another. “I’m a Democrat married to a Republican,” Cummons said, and laughed. “This was not disclosed to me at the point of our engagement—there was just blind love—but we don’t discuss politics. That is not wise for our marriage.”
Others in Farmington are more outspoken about their politics. In a blue farmhouse at the edge of town, Steven Torman, a former truck driver who identified himself as being of Cherokee descent, recently augmented the American flag on his porch with three Confederate flags, hung so that they face the road. “It’s my history,” Torman said. “I’m a free American, and I’m getting tired of being pushed around by the government.” When I asked him about Manchin, he said, “You’re going to find that most of the people in Farmington, and that includes the coal miners, don’t believe in Joe Manchin no more. He goes with the side that he thinks is winning.” I talked to Torman for a while, and he shared his thoughts on Trump (“Still my President”), covid (“man-made”), and the vaccine (“They’re not chipping me”). Finally, I asked what he wanted to see Washington achieve for people in Farmington. He thought for a long moment, and said, “Bring back our school system, our education. Bring it back into what it used to be. Bring prayer back in the schools. Salute our flag.”
When Manchin says Farmington is the reason that he hasn’t changed, he’s offering a selective reading of his own terrain. If Washington were abiding by the inclusive logic of Stephanie Cummons, his vision of collaboration would make sense. But, with few exceptions, the Republicans he faces in Congress are more nearly aligned with Steven Torman. Auvil told me, “Joe loves that image of bipartisanship, but the question is, bipartisanship to what end? We had bipartisanship that got us into an Iraq war that cost us two trillion dollars and thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.” He added, “If you’re dealing with a party committed to a lie as its core tenet, why do you have to be bipartisan with that?”
In June, 2010, Robert C. Byrd, of West Virginia, the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, died in office. Manchin, who had easily won reëlection for governor, entered the race to succeed him. Republicans coveted that seat in Congress, but Manchin had a strategy. He played up his roots as a coal-country centrist and deployed a publicity stunt that would have impressed his uncle Jimmy. In an advertisement that became famous, he took on climate-change legislation that Obama had endorsed. “I sued E.P.A., and I’ll take dead aim at the cap-and-trade bill, because it’s bad for West Virginia,” he said, as he pointed a hunting rifle at a copy of the bill and fired. That fall, he won with fifty-three per cent of the vote.
In the Senate, Manchin made a point of cultivating allies from both parties, arranging private meetings with every senator he could. In 2013, after twenty children and six educators were massacred in Newtown, Connecticut, he and Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, introduced legislation to strengthen background checks on gun sales. The initiative failed, but Manchin showed an acute understanding of his constituents: West Virginians were fierce supporters of the Second Amendment, yet polls showed that they would not object to stricter background checks.
As Manchin sought common ground, the relationship between the parties was collapsing. The Obama Administration had negotiated with Republicans for months, seeking support for health-care reform. (Paul Krugman, the Times columnist, called the effort a “quest for bipartisanship gone stark raving mad.”) In the end, the bill received only one Republican vote, and many Democrats concluded that the talks had been a mistake. As if to prove the point, Senator Mike Enzi, one of the Republican negotiators, boasted to a home crowd in Wyoming that, were it not for the protracted talks, “you would already have national health care.”
By 2013, Senate Republicans were attempting to filibuster a broad range of Obama’s actions, including his nominations for Defense Secretary and for the U.S. Court of Appeals. Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, invoked the so-called “nuclear option”: he lowered the threshold of votes for Presidential nominees (except those to the Supreme Court) from sixty votes to fifty-one. Manchin was one of three Democrats who voted against it. “I said, ‘Harry, you’re going to rue the day you do this,’ ” Manchin told me. The Democrats’ problem, he suggested, was that they’d lost touch with Republican leaders. “I said, ‘When’s the last time you had a cup of coffee? When’s the last time you had dinner? Do you know how many children or grandchildren So-and-So has?’ ”
Reid told me recently that he has no memory of such an exchange, but he did remember trying to get McConnell to eat with him. “The other Republican leaders I’ve dealt with—all of them—were happy to sit down and talk about things over lunch or in the office, but McConnell didn’t want to do that,” Reid said. (A McConnell spokesman denied this.) Reid stands by his decision to scale back the filibuster. Not doing so, he said, risked “Obama’s Presidency being an asterisk.”
As the 2016 election approached, Manchin endorsed Hillary Clinton, but, after Trump dominated the state, Manchin tacked toward him. During the transition, he was considered for Secretary of Energy, and he visited Trump Tower. “I’ve had more personal time with Trump in two months than I had with Obama in eight years,” he said at the time. The Cabinet post went to Rick Perry, but Manchin stayed close to Trump; his Senate Web page boasted that he “voted with the Trump Administration 74% of the time,” and noted, “No Senator (Democrat or Republican) has split with their party more often.”
On the most important votes, Manchin remained largely faithful to Democrats; in 2017, he voted against Trump’s tax cuts and against efforts to repeal Obamacare. When possible, it seemed, he found ways to generate stagecraft that would satisfy both sides: though he voted for many of Trump’s nominees, he never cast a deciding vote. Most notably, he broke with his party to back Brett Kavanaugh, for the Supreme Court. But he did so only after Collins, the Republican, had insured that Kavanaugh had enough votes to be confirmed. Manchin’s behavior irked progressives, but they had little leverage over him. In 2017, under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to take a side, he responded with irritation. “I don’t give a shit, you understand?” he told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. “Don’t care if I get elected, don’t care if I get defeated, how about that? If they think because I’m up for election, that I can be wrangled into voting for shit that I don’t like and can’t explain, they’re all crazy.” Every politician likes to dismiss critics, but Manchin had real reasons not to care what his peers said about him: he was seventy years old and prosperous, and he’d already held every job he was likely to get.
In his race the following year, Manchin won by just three percentage points. It was his smallest margin of victory in decades, and yet, given the Republicans’ ascendancy in West Virginia, it was a remarkable testament to his reputation. Rupp, the political scientist, said, “The most important saying in West Virginia politics is that everything in this state is political except politics, which is personal. This is why Joe does so well, because he has checked every box.”
Manchin’s box-checking has raised his profile and attracted money. In 2017, he and Collins were named honorary co-chairs of the business-friendly centrist group No Labels. In his election the next year, longtime Republican donors to groups associated with No Labels—including the hedge-fund manager Louis Bacon and the Chicago Bulls’ owner, Jerry Reinsdorf—gave to a pro-Manchin super pac called Duty & Country. While he was co-chair of No Labels, liberals criticized the group for spending almost twice as much to reëlect Republicans as it did for Democrats, and for considering a plan to attack the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi.
For all of Manchin’s reverence for bipartisanship, the concept has a mixed record. Though John Adams famously dreaded a “division of the republic into two great parties,” some of history’s most significant breakthroughs occurred despite widespread disagreement. In 1870, when Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, which extended the electoral franchise to African-American men, not a single Democrat voted for it. C. Vann Woodward, in his 1955 book, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” described the way that hymns to comity and healing accompanied the injustices created in the post-Reconstruction South: “Just as the Negro gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between white men, he now stood to lose his rights through the reconciliation of white men.”
When Manchin talks about his faith in compromise, he doesn’t mention electoral pressures; he presents it as a shibboleth of rural life. “The less you have, the more you need that human interaction,” he told me. He often cites the legacy of his predecessor, Robert Byrd, who rose from an impoverished childhood in the coalfields to become the unofficial historian of the Senate and the keeper of its traditions. But Byrd never regarded the filibuster as inviolable. He engineered a series of revisions to Senate institutions; in 1974, he led the creation of a fast-track “budget reconciliation” process, which was not subject to the filibuster. In 1979, while arguing for further revision, he said, “Certain rules that were necessary in the 19th century and in the early decades of this century must be changed to reflect changed circumstances.” Byrd was a canny legislator who brought home billions of dollars’ worth of highways, dams, and other improvements to what he called “one of the rock bottomest of states.”
Ira Shapiro, a Senate staffer from 1975 to 1987, and a former counsel to Byrd, told me, “The nightmare scenario for Byrd was the paralyzed Senate. He valued bipartisanship, he valued extended debate, but when that was not possible he reacted to it, and I don’t believe Byrd would have stood by and watched McConnell destroy the Senate.” Shapiro continued, “If you’ve got somebody whose simple goal is to make the President a failure, which is exactly what McConnell’s goal is, then you have to recalculate.”
After all the campaigning and the posturing, the houseboat dinners and the flattery, the first real test of dealmaking in the Biden era arrived on March 4th, when the Senate began its final debate on the President’s $1.9-trillion plan for covid relief. Republicans had already vowed to oppose it, so Democrats would have to pass it through reconciliation—though not before Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, made a show of resistance by forcing Senate clerks to read the entire six-hundred-and-twenty-eight-page bill aloud. It took ten hours and forty-four minutes.
Then Manchin stunned his colleagues by returning the proceedings to a standstill; among various demands, he insisted on restricting the length and the scope of unemployment benefits. Democrats had planned to give a tax break on up to ten thousand two hundred dollars of unemployment payments; Manchin would not allow the break to go to households that had earned more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Hours ticked by, as Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, and Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, took turns lobbying Manchin, to no avail. In the end, it took a direct call from Biden to break the impasse. Manchin got his changes and signed off on the bill.
The final result, considerably more modest than the original plan, was nevertheless a landmark piece of legislation, which included a tax credit for Americans with children, constituting the largest antipoverty effort in a generation. Manchin told me that he agreed to give up the hunt for Republican votes because Biden appealed to him personally: “I said, ‘Sir, as your friend and my President, if you’re asking me to do it, I’ll do it, against my better judgment.’ ” But he had also left Biden with a warning: he was not going to pass other bills without Republicans. “I said, ‘I can’t continue. I don’t believe it’s good for our country.’ ”
The spectacle of a Democrat from one of America’s neediest states laboring to reduce federal assistance infuriated many of his colleagues. “I think the man is utterly full of shit and not even good at it,” a Democratic aide told me. “I’m not the only frustrated Democrat, but no one can piss off Manchin right now.” Manchin talked constantly about negotiating, but, when progressives offered concrete benefits that West Virginians clearly needed, he did not budge. “Manchin could say, ‘This is a hostage-taking: give me roads, bridges, broadband, and I will give you my vote.’ And we would do it!,” Faiz Shakir, a political adviser to Bernie Sanders, said. “We could make your legacy amazing. You could lower prescription-drug costs for West Virginians. You could expand health insurance. You could have ‘Joe Manchin highways’ all over the place, ‘Joe Manchin water facilities.’ Instead, he says, ‘No, let’s tweak on the margins, in ways that only some Republicans can support.’ ”
Manchin is convinced that some progressive objectives, such as a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, would harm West Virginia’s economy. “I can’t lose one job. I don’t have one to spare,” he told me. “I know where it’s going to hit the hardest: rural America.” He has proposed a compromise at eleven dollars an hour. “I looked at my Democrat friends and I said, ‘You’re going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good,’ ” he added. “When do you expect to get a hundred per cent of everything you want?”
Even as many Democrats complain about Manchin, they have been quietly composing a playbook for winning his coöperation. “Whatever you want the ultimate resolution to be, you need to propose something that’s two or three ticks to the left of that, so that Manchin can look like he dragged you toward the middle,” the Democratic strategist said. But Sean McElwee, a progressive activist who heads the polling firm Data for Progress, advised a different approach: “If you’re talking about this stuff in the way that you would talk about it with your liberal friends, you’re almost certainly fucking up.” McElwee wanted Democrats to take a vocabulary lesson from Manchin: Don’t talk about infrastructure spending that will combat climate change; talk about jobs. “Too often, when we have something in mind like tax credits for electric vehicles, the batteries are not even American-made,” he said. Manchin has been wary of proposals to create a clean-energy standard. But, McElwee said, “I think he is gettable on a clean-energy standard if it can create jobs, because he understands that West Virginia needs a part of that.” In March, Biden nominated Gayle Manchin to be the federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission, a development agency launched by J.F.K. to address the poverty that he had observed during the 1960 campaign.
Some Democrats suspected that Manchin would agree to change the filibuster after he saw obvious cases of Republican obstruction. Reid predicted to me, “I think there’s going to come a time when Joe’s going to say, ‘I’ve given it all this time. I’ve tried to be bipartisan. We can’t take it anymore.’ ”
The pressure on Manchin was rising on the right, too. In March, as Congress moved toward showdowns over voting rights and infrastructure, the advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which was founded by the Koch brothers, the conservative oil magnates, bought advertisements on West Virginia radio, urging Manchin to “reject a partisan agenda that will hold West Virginians back from reaching their full potential.” The group also created a Web site to generate public demands for Manchin to stop “harmful partisan policy.” A coalition of conservative groups bused activists in to Charleston to stage a rally at the capitol, calling on Manchin to protect the filibuster.
They got what they wanted. On June 6th, in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin wrote that he would not alter the filibuster or advance a voting-rights bill with no Republican support. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy,” he wrote. The voting-rights bill, which Senate Democrats had declared their top priority, was effectively dead. Manchin was not the only Democrat with reservations about the bill—“I think he is one person who speaks for many,” McElwee said—but he was the most outspoken, and some members of his party no longer hid their contempt. Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted, “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’ ”
Nobody who knows Manchin well was surprised by his decision. “I would bet a year of my salary that he would not agree to change the filibuster,” Jonathan Kott, a former senior adviser to Manchin, had told me. “He would quit the Senate before he does that.” There was little that Democrats could do to persuade him. They could threaten to take away his position as chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but that would only improve his reputation with conservatives at home. Progressives could challenge him in a primary, but, if they lost the general election, they would likely end up with a Republican along the lines of the state’s junior senator, Shelley Moore Capito, who has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, defund Planned Parenthood, block the covid-relief bill, and acquit Trump, twice. If Democrats want to feel less captive to Manchin, they need to figure out how to elect more Democrats in places like West Virginia.
One morning in May, I followed Manchin to an event in Fairmont, the seat of Marion County, near his home town. Before it started, he spoke to a group of reporters about the For the People Act, nimbly switching between the vocabularies of the right and the left. “I understand the states’ rights,” he said, and mentioned the Tenth Amendment—catnip for conservatives. “But, on the other hand, every election should be accessible.” Voter access—that would play well with Democrats. “We should know who you are.” Voter I.D.—back to the right again. “But now you’ve got some states going off the rails, trying to make it almost difficult, because they don’t like the outcome of the election”—once more to the left. (A few weeks later, Manchin circulated a memo to colleagues in Congress, suggesting that he’d support the bill if it included a similarly mixed set of provisions. If common ground does not exist in Washington, Manchin was going to try to will it into being.)
After finishing with the reporters, Manchin stepped to the front of an auditorium full of local officials, including leaders of small towns and cities nearby. He talked to them first about the thing they had come to hear—how they could tap into covid-relief funds—and then about what was on his mind. “We have been radicalized,” he said. “I never had a cell phone growing up. I started so long ago, it was four-digit numbers.” That got a laugh. “I didn’t have a computer. I never had access to all this information around. I didn’t know how to process it. None of us did, in our age group. You know how we processed it? We went to our comfort zone. If you’re leaning a little bit left, if you’re a little bit more progressive or liberal, ‘I got to find somebody who’s talking to me.’ If you’re a little bit right and very conservative, ‘I got another network over here. I’ve got a cable news I can go to, and they’ll tell me exactly what makes me feel good.’ So we got ourselves in this situation.”
In Manchin’s laments about radical politics and the pace of change, one could hear the protests of a man standing athwart history, not quite yelling “Stop,” but certainly yelling “Whoa.” If Republicans regain the majority in 2022, his moment of prominence will be over as abruptly as it arrived. What he does until then will determine if the Democratic Party, to which he devoted his career, remembers him as a hero who advanced its goals or as the man who obstructed them. For all of Manchin’s hesitations, politics is changing fast, even in the terrain he calls home.
Not far from where Manchin spoke to the local grandees, I had coffee with Aryanna Islam, a senior at Manchin’s alma mater, West Virginia University, who had recently been elected president of the College Democrats of West Virginia. Islam grew up in Fairmont. She told me that her father, Pinto, had moved from Bangladesh in 1992, and found work at Cracker Barrel, where he fell in love with his boss, a white West Virginian named Kathy Long. “They had to date secretly until he quit,” Islam said. She grew up in the public schools in Marion County, which were overwhelmingly white. “I was the diversity,” she said. In 2008, when she was eight years old, she read a kids’ biography of Obama and learned about his biracial background. “I said, ‘Wait a minute—that’s me, too!’ That really affected me.” When she was seventeen, she got a job through Manchin’s office as a page in the U.S. Senate. Two years later, she returned to intern in his office, answering phones and jotting down constituents’ comments. “There were a lot of angry phone calls. You’ll have one that’s, like, ‘He’s working with A.O.C.!’ And the other is, like, ‘He’s not working with her enough.’ ” She credited Manchin with launching her into politics.
But, over time, she had grown uncomfortable with his conservatism. To earn extra money, she worked at K.F.C., for eight dollars and seventy-five cents an hour. “The typical trope is ‘Oh, there’s just teen-agers working there,’ ” she said. “But that’s just not true, and if they don’t have enough to live on they have to resort to welfare services, to put food on their table.” She did not understand Manchin’s arguments for limiting the minimum wage to eleven dollars an hour. “It’s not livable, even here in West Virginia,” she said. “National media would have you believe ‘Oh, we’re very conservative. We don’t want the government giving us stimulus checks.’ But people really, really appreciated that! Where I worked, people were, like, ‘I need this to pay rent, or get food for the week.’ ”
Islam ran for the state legislature last year, and lost, but she’ll run again. She’s twenty-one years old, and like most of her friends she sees herself as a thoroughgoing progressive. She said, “A lot of people around here see government as a force for bad, and I want to see that change. I think it’s important to bring a voice like mine, as someone who’s young, who’s a person of color here in West Virginia, especially. I’d bring a whole new perspective to things. I want to get that into our political system.”
Democrats in Washington tend to assume that places like West Virginia will never be pulled back from the grip of the conservative movement. But, in recent years, a liberal backlash to the political establishment has gained force there. In the 2016 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders won all fifty-five counties in the state. This February, a poll commissioned by workers’ advocates found that sixty-three per cent of West Virginians support a fifteen-dollar minimum wage—a level comparable to the state’s support for Trump. Islam has heard enough about bipartisanship. “Senator Manchin is waiting for something that’s just never going to happen,” she said. “It’s just holding up action that can be taken. He’s worried about what Republicans in West Virginia will say about him, but they’re going to trash him no matter what. So he might as well get us something in the process. He has the power now.” ♦
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