When it comes to the Brett Kavanaugh vote, it’s not about Joe Manchin

| 10:19 pm EDT September 27, 2018
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Now that Brett Kavanaugh has set himself on fire during his mentally unstable Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, it appears the Republicans are going to try to move forward with a sink-or-swim vote anyway. We don’t know how red state Democratic Senator Joe Manchin will vote when it comes to the Kavanaugh nomination – but we do know that Manchin’s vote won’t matter one way or the other.

Joe Manchin only votes with the Democrats roughly seventy percent of the time. Yet never once have you heard about him casting a deciding vote against the Democrats. There’s a reason for that. He sometimes strategically votes against the Democrats when it’s not a close vote total to begin with, and his vote isn’t going to impact the outcome one way or the other. That way, when he has to go back home to West Virginia, he can tell his conservative constituents that he voted bipartisan. This is true of the red state Democrats in general. So why do we keep hearing Manchin’s name tonight?

Two reasons. First, throughout the Kavanaugh confirmation process, cable news hosts have periodically mentioned that we don’t know how the red state Democrats will vote. This is true, but misleading. Manchin and the others will only consider voting for Kavanaugh if the Republicans already have the votes to confirm him anyway. If the Republicans are short, the red state Dems are not going to cast the deciding votes to put Kavanaugh over the top. It never works that way – and it certainly wouldn’t go that way on the most important vote in recent Senate history.

The second reason we’re hearing buzz about Joe Manchin tonight: red state Democrats have to spend the process acting like they have an “open mind” about their vote, so that – again – they can go home afterward and paint themselves as moderates. There are scattered reports that Manchin, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Jeff Flake met tonight. What does this tell us about how they’ll vote? Nothing. But whichever way Manchin goes, he will not cast the deciding vote. That’s simply not how these things work.