Opinion: Joe Manchin Keeps Digging His Political Grave Deeper
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced on Sunday that he “cannot vote to continue with” President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation.
Photo: Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
Manchin made the announcement this weekend via Fox News Sunday just 30 minutes after he sent an aide to tell the president of the United States and congressional leadership that he was going to kill the Democrat’s most significant piece of legislation.
Manchin won a special senate election in 2010 with 54% of the vote. He was re-elected in 2012 with 60% of the vote and then narrowly won in 2018, beating his Republican opponent with only a 0.3% difference. Manchin won by only 19,000 votes in a year where nationally, Democrats had an average popular vote margin of +8.6% and won a net 41 house seats. In the 2020 presidential election, then-president Donald Trump trounced President Biden with almost 69% of the vote to Biden’s 29%. This goes to show that Manchin is unlikely to win re-election in a state as red as West Virginia regardless of how “moderate” he appears on issues.
According to a recent poll, 68% of West Virginia voters strongly support or somewhat support Biden’s Build Back Better Act.
Data For Progress
Manchin still thinks he has a shot at being re-elected in a state completely different from the one he was elected to in 2010, but that’s probably not the reason he crushed the Build Back Better Act.
According to a new Washigton Post report, Manchin knows he received close to half a million dollars in returns on his investments in the coal industry in 2020 alone. Manchin claims a blind trust keeps him in the dark; but that doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse for his climate votes to climate activists. Manchin’s most recent financial disclosure show that the coal company that he helped found and operate payed him $492,000 in interest and other income in 2021. Contrary to his public comments about being in the dark, Manchin signed a sworn statement saying he knows about these earnings.
These somehow legal investments in the coal industry may or may not be the reason Manchin chose to kill the Build Back Better Act; what we do know is that Manchin likely isn’t helping his re-election which is already bordering impossible. It appears that Joe Manchin wants to go down in the history books as someone who valued his coal investments more than the future generations of America.