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Joe Manchin doesn’t care about voting rights because he doesn’t have to
Joe Manchin’s announcement over the weekend that he would not support either ending the filibuster nor the For The People Act — Democrats’ sweeping voting rights bill — rocked the political world. “…[V]oting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen… I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote in an op-ed for home state newspaper the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
This has infuriated progressives, but it is hardly surprising. Rather than his decision being, as Manchin would have us believe, a desire to seek bipartisanship, it is simply political calculus. Joe Manchin has little political impetus to support voting rights yet every reason to oppose it. He is putting his own self-interest over that of our democracy, the very fate of which hangs in the balance.
To understand why Manchin would arrive at a decision that puts him at odds with the rest of his party, one needs to understand both who voter suppression targets and why it doesn’t matter to politicians in a state like West Virginia. Ahead of last year’s presidential election, a Guardian report on Texas polling place closures found that “the…
