Sen. Joe Manchin offered progressives some advice:

 

Let’s start this post with an intelligent suggestion;

 

NEVER START A SENTENCE WITH

 

(Lobbyist Sen. Joe Manchin offering advice)!

 

 

THE POINT with Chris Cillizza

 

 

September 30, 2021  | by Chris Cillizza and Lauren Dezenski

 

What Joe Manchin gets wrong about the Senate

 

 West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin offered progressives some advice:

 

If they want a bigger, more costly bill, they should 

 

"elect more liberals."

 

Which is a good line!

 

But Manchin misses the mark when it comes to the modern Senate!

 

According to GovTrack's ideology ratings,

 there are only two sitting Democratic senators -- Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema -- who rank more conservatively than the least conservative Republican.

 

The middle is slightly more robust on the Republican side, with six GOP senators ranking more liberally than the least liberal Democrat.

 

This chart from VoteView

 

paints the reality of the disappearing middle in stark terms, with every senator ranked based on their voting record in the current Congress.

 

The number of states that send a split partisan Senate delegation to Washington is just six, the lowest it has been in more than 100 years, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. 

 

(Sidebar:

 

These Senate numbers are consistent with the overall march of people to their respective partisan camps.

 

A Pew survey earlier this decade showed that 94% of Democrats were more liberal than the median Republican while 92% of Republicans were more conservative than the average Democrat.)

 

Those numbers too much for you?

Just go back two decades and look at the senators serving.

 

 (Thanks to VoteView, we can do this easily.)

 

The issue is that there are so few moderates -- especially on the Democratic side -- that when the margin between the parties is narrow (as it is now), a single senator, like Manchin, has almost total power. 

 

The Point: The disappearing middle in the Senate has consequences. And one of the big ones is to make the few senators -- like Manchin or Sinema -- who still peg themselves as centrists hugely powerful in moments just like this.

 

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