POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[spmetla]

How do you figure that this Pyrrhic victory for Democrats indicates a preference for centrist policy? You might as well argue that Biden's adoption of left policies helped him rather than not, since he ran so far ahead of more conservative Democrats.

After all this time, it should be abundantly clear that centrist approaches are inadequate to either the scale of our problems or even securing mere electoral success.

Furthermore, the idea too that ranked choice voting would lead to either a multi-party system or to Republican moderation is not supported. In almost all of the country except NY we have election results that are close to certifiable, and they have a story to tell...

My view is that the his siphoning off Republican votes that were variations of never-Trumpers and center-right voters gave him that edge. The ability of Trump to paint all Democrats as socialist/communist anarchists despite it being false was a way to motive his base. The more progressive wing of the Democratic party was of course not a big fan of Biden and would have preferred Warren or Sanders but thankfully turned out well as more of an anti-Trump vote than pro-Biden. Would Warren or Sanders have done better than Biden? It's possible but I honestly think that fewer Republicans would have voted for the Democratic ticket if either of them had the top billet, though we'll never know.

My support for Ranked Choice isn't with the illusion that it would result in large multi party systems like in continental Europe. I live in Hawaii and voting for anything other than Democrat is pretty much a protest vote beyond our county councilmembers and district representatives. I see it as more that it would allow for a third party option to not be a throw-away vote. I know plenty of people that prefer the Green Party or Libertarian policies and would like to vote for those but know that it's really just a throw away vote. Looking at the swing states that decided the election Jo Jorgensen seemed to have consistently gotten 1-1.5% of the vote which is about the margin that won it for Biden. If those voters could have had a second choice who knows how the election would have gone, perhaps it would have been solidly pro Trump or pro Biden. Ross Perot's run in 1992 is argued as one of the reasons Bush Sr lost and Clinton won.
Additionally there'd be more people that wouldn't mind voting for those third party options which would make them more viable and acceptable. If people could have a first choice candidate that might actually represent their ideals and then the compromise centrist candidate it is possible we'd get more voter turn out. I don't think this would make much of a difference for the POTOS position as it would likely remain R or D for the future but in the House and Senate and local legislatures third party options would be viable and possibly lead to no parties having a clear majority in the legislatures and having to form coalitions with all those ups and downs we see in Europe. Either way it'd likely stop the current trend of take power and dictate.

I agree a centrist approach will not resolve our issues alone, the solutions needed are usually 'extreme' but because of that it is difficult to actually get the majorities needed to implement them, not to mention if there are any downsides there's a reactionary movement to undo them completely. Radical change seems to not go over well in the US, even when it's absolutely necessary, incremental steps in the right direction seem to work well here though it's infuriatingly slow. The pendulum swing of each party gaining control and then dictating terms has made our domestic politics too partisan and our foreign policies fickle and unreliable.

I hope that Biden is able to get some Republican legislators to work with him on some of our pressing issues because if his turn in office is just years of filibusters and foot dragging until the mid-terms then I fear for the future of this nation.

[Montmorency]

My view is that the his siphoning off Republican votes that were variations of never-Trumpers and center-right voters gave him that edge. The ability of Trump to paint all Democrats as socialist/communist anarchists despite it being false was a way to motive his base. The more progressive wing of the Democratic party was of course not a big fan of Biden and would have preferred Warren or Sanders but thankfully turned out well as more of an anti-Trump vote than pro-Biden. Would Warren or Sanders have done better than Biden? It's possible but I honestly think that fewer Republicans would have voted for the Democratic ticket if either of them had the top billet, though we'll never know.

My support for Ranked Choice isn't with the illusion that it would result in large multi party systems like in continental Europe. I live in Hawaii and voting for anything other than Democrat is pretty much a protest vote beyond our county councilmembers and district representatives. I see it as more that it would allow for a third party option to not be a throw-away vote. I know plenty of people that prefer the Green Party or Libertarian policies and would like to vote for those but know that it's really just a throw away vote. Looking at the swing states that decided the election Jo Jorgensen seemed to have consistently gotten 1-1.5% of the vote which is about the margin that won it for Biden. If those voters could have had a second choice who knows how the election would have gone, perhaps it would have been solidly pro Trump or pro Biden. Ross Perot's run in 1992 is argued as one of the reasons Bush Sr lost and Clinton won.
Additionally there'd be more people that wouldn't mind voting for those third party options which would make them more viable and acceptable. If people could have a first choice candidate that might actually represent their ideals and then the compromise centrist candidate it is possible we'd get more voter turn out. I don't think this would make much of a difference for the POTOS position as it would likely remain R or D for the future but in the House and Senate and local legislatures third party options would be viable and possibly lead to no parties having a clear majority in the legislatures and having to form coalitions with all those ups and downs we see in Europe. Either way it'd likely stop the current trend of take power and dictate.

I don't like counterfactuals, so I would frame it as: By now we should acknowledge that from the beginning of the year Biden had the strongest case for being a successful party leader. I am not of the opinion that simply making an open, detailed, and passionate case on policy merits to the American public is sufficient to "win" votes. We know that it's perfectly possible for someone to want a $20 minimum wage and universal healthcare while hating Democrats. Status grievance is determinative. Although, again, it will take a year to do a proper post-mortem; exit polling suggests, contrary to so many expectations set by pre-election polling, that WHITE MEN swung hard toward Biden while other demographics either kept static or moved marginally toward Trump. We need to figure out what the best facts of the matter are.

I support ranked choice btw, or more precisely ranked pairs. I don't know about Libertarian voters deciding anything (except maybe Georgia or Arizona, and almost certainly the Ossof-Perdue runoff ramp), because in this election they constituted only 1% of the national vote. That is to say, as expected the third party vote share collapsed to its usual level in high-salience elections, meaning that most of the people voting Libertarian now are not poached Republicans but the hard core of the third party vote. On the other hand, I'm perfectly fine with the Republican Party going to war with the Libertarians.

A more important factor than third party voters this election (and they're not typically impactful) was, as I mentioned earlier, the Undecided vote share that split a little more evenly in 2016 going almost entirely to Trump/Republicans in this election. (Speaking of Clinton and Perot, the work I'm familiar with has indicated that Perot voters were about evenly-split in their secondary preferences).

Tangentially, if there's ever going to be an electoral structure for third parties in this country, they have to stop being joke organizations that seemingly only exist to grift followers or troll/hinder the major parties. At least, say, the Working Families party has some local existence in the Northeast, in contrast to the Greens or Libertarians.

Either way it'd likely stop the current trend of take power and dictate.

One thing I will push back against is the idea that even more gridlock in Congress would somehow produce compromise and good governance. It never has in history; meanwhile our backlog of crippling problems is just accumulating. I believe this country would have a clarifying experience, and be much better off, with a cycle under each party of total majoritarian control. Well, not under Republicans, simply because there is a serious chance of them implementing a single-party dictatorship. But if that impulse could be contained I would relish the opportunity for, say, a Democratic government to implement Medicare for All, only for a subsequent Republican government to abolish it and Social Security.

Because I believe such a rampage would permanently exhaust the Republican Party and finally end the interregnum before the birth of a new progressive age.

Again, in theory. Republicans can no longer be counted on to peacefully transfer power so that's kind of a dealbreaker. Ultimately this halfway-accelerationist argument for majoritarianism is not the actual case for majoritarianism, I'm just saying it would be preferable to the current arrangement. The argument for majoritarianism is the same as in the rest of the world, namely that majorities should have the opportunity to govern. If Clinton and Obama had had an opportunity to govern without Republican obstruction, I believe it would be much more difficult for Republicans to make the case for government dysfunction. Because it's been a cycle, right? Republicans blow shit up, the pendulum swings and Dems take power and can barely begin cleaning up the mess, before long Republicans regain power with an ever-more-radical bent and wreck even more shit...

I agree a centrist approach will not resolve our issues alone, the solutions needed are usually 'extreme' but because of that it is difficult to actually get the majorities needed to implement them, not to mention if there are any downsides there's a reactionary movement to undo them completely. Radical change seems to not go over well in the US, even when it's absolutely necessary, incremental steps in the right direction seem to work well here though it's infuriatingly slow.

Here's the thing: I'm only a socialist because of the self-evident failures of the centrist establishment. That part of the problem was that establishment's permanent and deepening siege under the forces of Reaction only emphasizes the failure to protect us.

Take climate change as an example. An international, incremental, US-led effort from the HW Bush admin on could have given us a smooth transition that hardly anyone would even have noticed. Now, however, it's the analog of facing a German front at the gates of Moscow without any national defense yet organized. Every delay or failure of what could have been productive incremental change only makes radical change increasingly necessary. I recognize this not because I love radical change for its own sake, but because I can grasp simple causality.

Constant incremental change may even be preferable to violent upheaval, but violent upheaval only becomes available/necessary because reform was lacking or absent! When there is a revolutionary regime change, sometimes one is sad to see the new regime. One is never sad to see the old one go.

Sink or swim.

I hope that Biden is able to get some Republican legislators to work with him on some of our pressing issues because if his turn in office is just years of filibusters and foot dragging until the mid-terms then I fear for the future of this nation.

The divergent and self-contained environment of the Georgia runoffs will be an interesting comparison point and testing ground. IMO Democrats should strive to make it very explicitly clear that Biden's ability to act as President is limited by control of the Senate. I would go so far as to promise that, if Republicans retain control their state will go bankrupt and schools will close, whereas if Democrats win then the country (and Georgia) will get bailouts and stimulus checks. Put everything else on the backburner for 2 months besides the immediate material consequences for Georgia and Georgians of this election.

The only other hope, laughable as it is, would be to try to bribe Susan Collins on the theory that her position is secure enough that she can go rogue from the GOP. This theory will fail, if only because by all accounts Collins is well-committed to the Republican project.

[ReluctantSamurai]

whereas if Democrats win then the country (and Georgia) will get bailouts and stimulus checks.

Perhaps....but then there's Sen. Joe Manchin (D) W. Virginia to consider:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/mem...manchin/412391

And he's already gone on record as opposing ending the filibuster, court-packing, Medicare-for-All, and Green New Deal. The only Democrat to vote yes on the Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS nomination:

https://www.rollcall.com/2020/11/09/...he-filibuster/

50/50 may not be sufficient against a man who considers Robert C. Byrd the man who "wrote the rules of the Senate"---the same Robert C. Byrd who organized a KKK chapter in W. Virginia in the early 1940's, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and supported the Vietnam War.

[spmetla]

I support ranked choice btw, or more precisely ranked pairs. I don't know about Libertarian voters deciding anything (except maybe Georgia or Arizona, and almost certainly the Ossof-Perdue runoff ramp), because in this election they constituted only 1% of the national vote. That is to say, as expected the third party vote share collapsed to its usual level in high-salience elections, meaning that most of the people voting Libertarian now are not poached Republicans but the hard core of the third party vote. On the other hand, I'm perfectly fine with the Republican Party going to war with the Libertarians.

Tangentially, if there's ever going to be an electoral structure for third parties in this country, they have to stop being joke organizations that seemingly only exist to grift followers or troll/hinder the major parties. At least, say, the Working Families party has some local existence in the Northeast, in contrast to the Greens or Libertarians.

Wouldn't you like it if it was okay for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to run as independents or lead one of the many progressive/socialist parties in existence without it gleaning votes away from the primary Democrat running? I think one of the reasons the third parties are jokes is exactly because they to grift followers and hinder major parties. A the local levels is where they can make a difference before taking things nationally.
That's why the new Republican tactic of running a third party candidate with a simliar last name to glean off votes from the competition is dangerous, will likely be repeated elsewhere and only a ranked voting system could totally mitigate.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/pol...247132821.html

NO-PARTY CANDIDATE IS A FACTOR
Much mystery remains around the network of unknown candidates with no party affiliation (NPA) who ran in three competitive Senate districts, most notably in Senate District 37, where the third-party candidate netted more than 6,300 votes and likely influenced the outcome.

Voters in Senate Districts 9, 37 and 39 were targeted by similar-looking political mail ads funded by a mystery donor that aimed to confuse voters in an apparent effort to shave votes from Democratic candidates.

One thing I will push back against is the idea that even more gridlock in Congress would somehow produce compromise and good governance. It never has in history; meanwhile our backlog of crippling problems is just accumulating. I believe this country would have a clarifying experience, and be much better off, with a cycle under each party of total majoritarian control. Well, not under Republicans, simply because there is a serious chance of them implementing a single-party dictatorship. But if that impulse could be contained I would relish the opportunity for, say, a Democratic government to implement Medicare for All, only for a subsequent Republican government to abolish it and Social Security.

Constant incremental change may even be preferable to violent upheaval, but violent upheaval only becomes available/necessary because reform was lacking or absent! When there is a revolutionary regime change, sometimes one is sad to see the new regime. One is never sad to see the old one go.

The divergent and self-contained environment of the Georgia runoffs will be an interesting comparison point and testing ground. IMO Democrats should strive to make it very explicitly clear that Biden's ability to act as President is limited by control of the Senate. I would go so far as to promise that, if Republicans retain control their state will go bankrupt and schools will close, whereas if Democrats win then the country (and Georgia) will get bailouts and stimulus checks. Put everything else on the backburner for 2 months besides the immediate material consequences for Georgia and Georgians of this election.

I don't want more gridlock but as each party becomes more extreme it means that daring to work with the opposition loses you your own re-election against a competitor from your own party. The idea of making medicare for all and then it being repealed a few years later is dangerous to fabric of the nation. I'd prefer that we edge the ACA toward that option, creating a public option would be a step in that direction, after people see that it's not the end of the world then take another step.

I agree on the Georgia runoffs, will be very interesting testing ground.

[Montmorency]

Something that occurs to me: Biden at times made it a plank of his campaign that conservatives should split their tickets against Trump in order to hold both parties accountable.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-thing-923669/
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/17/polit...ach/index.html

I can't find it now, but I recall reading of one Biden talk in which he stated directly a recommendation that Republicans vote for him for President while voting Republicans downballot to keep him in check.

Might that have had some effect? Seems like suboptimal messaging at any rate.

Perhaps....but then there's Sen. Joe Manchin (D) W. Virginia to consider:

Regarding Manchin, from what I've been able to gather he has never opposed the caucus on a vote that really mattered. Although West Virginia's finances appear to be relatively-good in the short term, so that might remove some incentive.

Wouldn't you like it if it was okay for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to run as independents or lead one of the many progressive/socialist parties in existence without it gleaning votes away from the primary Democrat running? I think one of the reasons the third parties are jokes is exactly because they to grift followers and hinder major parties. A the local levels is where they can make a difference before taking things nationally.
That's why the new Republican tactic of running a third party candidate with a simliar last name to glean off votes from the competition is dangerous, will likely be repeated elsewhere and only a ranked voting system could totally mitigate.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/pol...247132821.html

Maybe if we transitioned to a parliamentary-type system, but in our social and political environment we work better as a Popular Front. Remember, this is not a normal country and won't be one for our lifetimes probably. These lights aren't coming on anytime soon.

I don't want more gridlock but as each party becomes more extreme it means that daring to work with the opposition loses you your own re-election against a competitor from your own party. The idea of making medicare for all and then it being repealed a few years later is dangerous to fabric of the nation. I'd prefer that we edge the ACA toward that option, creating a public option would be a step in that direction, after people see that it's not the end of the world then take another step.

For sure. But would such an undisguised legislative confrontation be worse than the current - Cold War?

As for polarization, bipartisanship will spring eternal among liberals. It's the psychology. Meanwhile, think about McConnell's posture toward Obama/Biden as published in Obama's memoir (see above). If there were a Republican with ideas worth hearing, to whom we could impute a good-faith willingness to collaboratively address identified issues, they wouldn't be a Republican in the first place. How many times do I have to post that Mars Attacks clip?

In my view, this utopia is what I sense coming from elated crowds in the streets and some people here. And you seem to partake in it with your metaphors of tearing opponents' throats and not taking things lying down. Add to it вставание с колен and the electoral rhetoric practiced by Americans will be remerkably close to the one used in current Russia.

I don't understand how any of those sentences relate to each other or to the contents of this thread.




Now for a rant directed at the idea that leftist ideas or activism are damaging vulnerable elected Democrats.

Here is an ad that Sen. Loeffler's (R-GA) campaign aired. (Further proof that American reactionaries outpace European ones btw.)
https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/s...02428240359424 [VIDEO]

Sen. Kelly Loeffler's new spot is all about how she's "more conservative than Attila the Hun," and includes an actor portraying a grunting Attila who delivers orders to, among other things, "eliminate the liberal scribes."

Why is it that Republicans can run on how conservative they are, and paint their opponents as socialists, and that works, but when Democrats run on how moderate they are, and correctly label all the reactionary and harmful things their opponents want to do, moderate voters get angry because they think Dems are overreacting and being hyperbolic about Republicans?
Something tells me this isn't the fault of community organizers in Minneapolis or Louisville. It's that branding and messaging thing again.

Can you imagine if a Democratic candidate in a purple district ran unironically with this as a platform?



And it received no negative attention from either party?


One lesson is becoming clear: Liberals need to be taught to resent and fear these reactionaries, so that they too can be mobilized at ever-higher rates.


Because White Evangelicals, who make up ~15% of the population, MAY have formed up to half of all Trump voters.

I was startled this week when, during a conversation with a prominent figure in Democratic circles, he blurted out to me: “People who want to live in a white supremacist society vote Republican. Those who don’t vote Democrat.”

Yes, those Evangelicals, the voting bloc who emerged in the 1970s as a reliable Republican base, forged as they were in reaction to the Democrats' civil rights turn in the 1960s, who vote for Republicans at rates comparable to the Democrats' vote share among African Americans.



Notice that Republicans (though not just evangelicals) have finally come round to abandoning the American flag, because their abstracted instincts outpace the symbolic content of it.

Many of us over the past 4 years have had to come to terms with it, but the truth is that at least 1/3 of the population is a hardcore fascist element that is spiritually animated by the Confederate mindset - which was never defeated, but rather prevailed for a century and is still in contention!

As this prescient post from 2014 says,

The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

... The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change. When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

Why do Republicans and Democrats get disparate reception and treatment in the media and their audiences? Well, Republicans by and large know what they want in a way that liberals don't. It maps onto Yeat's quotable formulation that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Painful as it is, we can't fight an invisible war against those who have mastered the art of insurgency on American soil and in the American mind for 150 years. The people must be apprised of the threat.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Regarding Manchin, from what I've been able to gather he has never opposed the caucus on a vote that really mattered.

Not so fast... His voting record on environmental issues is abysmal, and he now stands to chair the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...e-manchin-iii/

Voted against S.J.Res. 53 which would have rescinded Trump's relaxation of emission standards for power plants; voted for the appointment of Andrew Wheeler (a former coal industry lobbyist) to head the EPA (W. Virginia is the 2d largest producer of coal in the US); voted against H.J.Res. 36 which would have relaxed regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas industry operations (a +1 for Manchin); voted for the approval of Scott Priutt as Administrator of the EPA (who later had to resign amid a slew of ethics scandals); and who voted for nearly every one of Trump's government appointees.

A mixed bag to say the least, but his stance on energy production is quite clear----he won't do anything to piss off his corporate donors in the coal industry. If he gets to chair the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to get any clean air proposals through the Senate even if the Dems pick up the two seats in Georgia.

[Hooahguy]

Excellent interview with Obama in The Atlantic, talking about how American democracy is in trouble:

I come out of this book very worried about the degree to which we do not have a common baseline of fact and a common story. We don’t have a Walter Cronkite describing the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination but also saying to supporters and detractors alike of the Vietnam War that this is not going the way the generals and the White House are telling us. Without this common narrative, democracy becomes very tough.

Remember, after Iowa my candidacy survives Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright, and two minutes of videotape in which my pastor is in kente cloth cursing out America. And the fact is that I was able to provide context for that, and I ended up winning over a huge swath of the country that has never set foot on the South Side of Chicago and was troubled by what he said. I mean, that’s an indicator of a different media environment.

Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring. This stuff takes root. I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories. The fact is that there is still a large portion of the country that was taken in by a carnival barker.
[..]
If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.

I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change. I can even accept somebody making an argument that, based on what I know about human nature, it’s too late to do anything serious about this—the Chinese aren’t going to do it, the Indians aren’t going to do it—and that the best we can do is adapt. I disagree with that, but I accept that it’s a coherent argument. I don’t know what to say if you simply say, “This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books. And that footage of glaciers dropping off the shelves of Antarctica and Greenland are all phony.” Where do I start trying to figure out where to do something?

Well worth the read.

[Montmorency]

Not so fast... His voting record on environmental issues is abysmal, and he now stands to chair the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...e-manchin-iii/

Voted against S.J.Res. 53 which would have rescinded Trump's relaxation of emission standards for power plants; voted for the appointment of Andrew Wheeler (a former coal industry lobbyist) to head the EPA (W. Virginia is the 2d largest producer of coal in the US); voted against H.J.Res. 36 which would have relaxed regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas industry operations (a +1 for Manchin); voted for the approval of Scott Priutt as Administrator of the EPA (who later had to resign amid a slew of ethics scandals); and who voted for nearly every one of Trump's government appointees.

A mixed bag to say the least, but his stance on energy production is quite clear----he won't do anything to piss off his corporate donors in the coal industry. If he gets to chair the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to get any clean air proposals through the Senate even if the Dems pick up the two seats in Georgia.

But that's what I mean when I speak of votes that really matter. On confirmation votes, Manchin never seems to have been a deciding vote because the Republicans had a majority anyway. On Kavanaugh he was the 50th vote, but it was widely contextualized at the time as not being worth the prospective damage to his imminent reelection (the confirmation was a month before the midterms) to go out on a limb to force Republicans to choose a slightly-less reprehensible candidate for Supreme Court. Manchin being, of course, an idiosyncratically-tolerated Democratic holdout in what had become the most Republican state in the country*. For the named resolutions on environmental regulations, I believe they too will fall into the pattern of being symbolic votes from a minority position. If the strategy is to shore up his centrist bona fides in West Virginia, probably no use in visibly voting with a minority to no effect.

Let's see what happens with Manchin (hopefully) among 50+. Of course, with a razor thin margin , the thing we had always hoped to avoid with a fat buffer in the majority, there will be hard limits on what one can demand of him or a number of other frontline Dems. But I find it hard to believe Manchin would flatly oppose a handful of Dem priorities on electoral reform and pandemic relief, to start.

Get the man some pork.

An executive jubilee for most student debt wouldn't depend on Manchin though, and it would be pretty high-impact. I bet it also spurs productive electoral participation among people in their 20s and 30s, as well as those currently in their teens.

*Before 2008, West Virginia had been a swing state. Suddenly, it became the most Republican state in the country, or at least alongside Idaho and Wyoming. I wonder what happened...

[ReluctantSamurai]

But that's what I mean when I speak of votes that really matter. On confirmation votes, Manchin never seems to have been a deciding vote because the Republicans had a majority anyway.

Let's say, for sheer fantasy sake, that the Dems take both Georgia seats making it a 50/50 split in the Senate. Now let's imagine a vote comes up on a key clean energy bill in Congress. Which way do you think Manchin will vote? I have no doubts based on his voting record (nevermind that the GOP already had more than enough votes for a particular bill) for putting not one but two fossil fuel advocates as head of the EPA (the first, Scott Pruitt had to resign amid ethics scandals). And he's already come out as philosophically against "Green Energy". This man is really a corporate Republican in the disguise of a Democrat.

And you are overlooking the damage he can cause as a potential chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A quick look at what that committee does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...ural_Resources

Coal production, distribution, and utilization; energy policy; energy regulation and policy; energy research and development; oil and gas production and distribution; solar energy systems......

This senator, who is most obviously beholden to his coal industry donors, is possibly going to be in a position to be the next Dr. No when it comes to Biden trying to get clean energy legislation passed. We can reference this conversation for later where I can say 'I told you so', or you will be saying the same to me. It's a moot point if the Dems don't take both Georgia seats as far as the chair position is concerned.....