Manchin allies say Axelrod, Dems are crazy to count him out in West Virginia

Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) faces a tough road to winning reelection to a fourth Senate term, but Manchin allies say national pundits are writing him off too soon.

Manchin allies say pundits who think Manchin has little to no chance of winning reelection if West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is the GOP nominee note Justice will face a tough Republican primary that will weaken him if he manages to advance to the general election.

“David Axelrod doesn’t know a lot about West Virginia politics and is a brilliant strategist but probably doesn’t spend much time in West Virginia with Joe Manchin and should before he counts him out,” said Jonathan Kott, a Democratic strategist who served as a Senate aide to Manchin.

Axelrod, a veteran Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to former President Obama, on Monday pronounced Manchin a “dead man walking in West Virginia.”

“There’s nowhere for him to go. He’s got a popular Republican governor in the state that Donald Trump carried by almost 40 points. He didn’t win by very much last time. So he knows that he can’t win reelection in that state,” Axelrod said on CNN.

A recent poll from East Carolina University showed Manchin trailing Justice by 22 points — 54 percent to 32 percent with 13 percent of voters undecided.

Axelrod speculated Manchin’s uphill path to winning reelection is encouraging his flirtation with running for president as a third-party candidate, perhaps backed by the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is raising $70 million to get a third-party candidate on the presidential ballot.

The veteran Democratic strategist said running for president would be “a graceful exit for him” from the Senate race.

Manchin says he won’t make a decision about his political future until the end of this year, but he hasn’t done anything to knock down speculation that he may run for president.

Asked over the weekend whether a presidential bid is still possible, Manchin said, “You better have Plan B, because if Plan A shows we’re going to the far reaches of both sides, the far left and the far right …” referring to the unpopularity of President Biden and former President Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president.

Kott argued that pundits in Washington are underestimating how tough Justice’s path to winning the Senate Republican nomination will be, and claims they forget he originally won election to the governor’s mansion in 2016 as a Democrat.

That has left conservatives with lingering suspicions about the governor and could help Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), Justice’s rival in the Republican primary, to defeat him.

The Club for Growth, a conservative, free-market political advocacy group, says it will spend as much as $10 million to help Mooney.

Mike Plante, a Democratic strategist based in Charleston, W.Va., said Axelrod “assumes Jim Justice is going to be the nominee,” but he pointed out the East Carolina poll showed Manchin and Mooney in a virtual tie, with Manchin attracting 40 percent support and Mooney getting 41 percent in a hypothetical matchup.

“The governor commands the bully pulpit here and has utilized that to his advantage, but there’s still a lot of game left to play before we get to the primary,” he said, noting the Department of Justice announced last week a lawsuit seeking $5 million in unpaid civil penalties and fees from Justice’s family coal business, which is run by his son, James Justice III.

“It’s way early in the game to be prognosticating who’s going to be the nominee for the Republicans,” he said.

Manchin predicted to reporters earlier this year that the Senate Republican primary would be a brawl, suggesting whoever emerges as the victor will be weakened heading into the general election.

“Let the games begin. It’s going to be a very entertaining primary on their side,” he told reporters recently.

A Manchin spokesperson said Axelrod is putting too much stock in the East Carolina poll.

“This is a funny comment about polls since the same smart pollsters said Barack Obama’s poll numbers proved he had no chance against Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump could never win the first election, and Republicans would win huge in 2022,” the Manchin spokesperson said.

“Sen. Manchin’s focus is on doing the best job for West Virginia and the American people. The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day,” the aide said.

Kott pointed out that Manchin had a 70 percent approval rating when he was governor, higher than Justice’s approval rate now in the same job.

He said the inclusion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt limit bill Congress passed last week, which will create more than 2,500 jobs in West Virginia, is the latest of several jobs bills that Manchin has helped steer through Congress during the Biden administration.

“There’s probably going to be another 10,000 jobs created because of his work in the last three years, just in West Virginia, including getting the MVP pipeline done, which nobody thought he could,” he said.  

Republican strategists say passing language now to speed the approval of the pipeline — a top Manchin priority — won’t undo the political damage they say he suffered by helping to advance the centerpiece of Biden’s tax and climate agenda.

“David Axelrod is right. West Virginians want nothing to do with Joe Manchin after we wrote Joe Biden’s massive green energy bill that will kill West Virginian jobs,” said Tate Mitchell, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

One Nation, a political advocacy group allied with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), announced in April it would spend $1 million on a campaign attacking Manchin for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act.

The group announced in May it would spend another $1 million targeting Manchin, bringing its total ad buy in West Virginia to $2 million. 

The law, which did not raise individual income or corporate tax rates, turned out to be far more modest than what the White House envisioned when it rolled out its Build Back Better agenda in 2021.

Even so, Manchin saw his approval rating in West Virginia take a hit after he voted for it.

A quarterly survey of registered voters in West Virginia by Morning Consult in April showed Manchin with a 38 percent approval rating and 55 percent disapproval rating. The same poll showed Justice with a 66 percent approval rating and 31 percent disapproval rating among all voters.

Manchin had a 57 percent approval rating in West Virginia in April 2022 after he sank President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda and rebelled against Senate Democrats’ efforts to weaken the Senate’s filibuster rule.

Voters at home, however, soured after Manchin struck his deal with Schumer to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which included an array of prescription drug and tax reforms along with more than $390 billion in investments to fight climate change.

Plante, the West Virginia-based Democratic strategist, said Manchin’s support “clearly had an impact” on his approval rating.

“The national Democratic brand in West Virginia unfortunately doesn’t play well here,” he said. “Joe has been able to successfully show that his brand is different from the national Democratic brand.”

Manchin has tried to distance himself from Biden by forcefully criticizing him for refusing to sit down earlier this year with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to negotiate a bill to raise the debt limit. He’s also slammed the administration’s implementation of the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act in a Wall Street Journal op-ed as a “betrayal.”

He said the administration interpreted the climate provisions so broadly that the cost of those incentives has grown to $570 billion and even threatened to vote to repeal the bill he helped craft.

Updated at 10:48 a.m.