Why Joe Manchin Is Screwed
Joe Manchin is probably not going to win reelection in 2024. I think most people who follow politics know this. But “probably not” can mean anything from a 0% chance, to a 49% chance, and which number it is closer to is important to legislative strategy. In this post, I am going to show why I think Manchin’s odds are much closer to 0 than they are to 50.
- West Virginia is an incredibly Republican state, and it is trending to the right. This can be seen through the raw results displayed below.
If you look at PVI, which adjusts for the national popular vote environment, you get the same story.
Basically, there has been a roughly 1.25% per year decline in West Virginia’s partisan lean relative to the country. This trend has been occurring for decades, as a result of increased density and education polarization (WV is predominantly rural, and has the lowest share of college educated people in the country). This trend will probably continue — the Democratic candidate in 2024 will probably do worse than Biden did in 2020. This will make it harder for Manchin to be reelected.
2. Ticket splitting rates have cratered in the last few decades. Here’s a chart from 538 estimating the percentage of Senate vote that can be explained by a state’s presidential vote.
And here’s a chart showing how many senators are from states the opposing party’s president won:
If you are a Senator from a state that the other party wins by 40+ points, and the correlation between Senate and Presidential voting is rising, this is extremely bad news.
3. Also, not only are ticket splitting rates fall over time, but they tend to crater during elections where the President is on the ballot. The Senate-Presidential correlation in 2016 was .91, according to David Shor. In 2018, it was .71. In 2020, it was .94. Even a return to 2012 level ticket splitting would mean a greater correlation (.79) than we saw in 2018.
4. The national environment in 2024 is highly likely to be worse for Democrats than it was in 2018, when they won the House popular vote by 8.6%. This is also bad news for Manchin.
5. Manchin barely won in 2018, holding on by just 3%.
If you put it all together, a national environment that will probably be worse, in a state trending the wrong way, with ticket splitting rates very likely to be lower, means that Manchin is screwed. As in, the most likely scenario is that he loses by more than 15%, if he even runs at all.
And we don’t really need to guess at his future: Collin Petersen is a perfect example of what’s going to happen. Petersen, who represented MN-07 for 30 years, was the most conservative Democrat in the House, and voted against impeachment. This allowed him to overperform Biden by 15% in his district. But since Biden lost MN-07 30%, this meant Petersen got smacked. If Manchin overperforms Biden by as much as Petersen did, he’ll lose by 25. If he overperforms Petersen by twice as much, he’ll still lose by 10.
Jonathan Robinson, a smart person who I like, told me to not be so deterministic about politics the other day on Twitter, which is generally good advice. So, I should probably say that I don’t think it is literally impossible for Manchin to win. But I do think that Manchin’s odds of holding his seat are definitely less than 20%, and probably less than 10%. 8% is about where I would put it. That is incredibly low for an incumbent Senator — probably the worst odds of anyone other than Scott Brown or Doug Jones in the last decade.
This ought to have profound implications for Manchin’s legislative strategy. If he had a 50–50 chance of holding his seat, and voting like Bernie Sanders would drops that to 10%, he’d be costing us .4 senate seats in expectation. If he has an 8% chance, and voting like Bernie would drop that to 2%, he’d only be costing us .06 seats. This should change his cost-benefit analysis dramatically. It probably won’t, but it should. If I was Manchin, I would do what Doug Jones did, and just give up on being reelected. Killing good policy to lose by 15% instead of 20% is a terrible idea.