Jonathan Kott, who worked for Joe Manchin for seven and a half years, joins The New Abnormal, and co-host Molly Jong-Fast gets right to the point: “Are you surprised by what you’re seeing right now” from the West Virginia senator?
“No,” says Kott. “He’s the exact same person he’s always been. It’s just he’s getting more attention in the last year than I think he had before.”
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“I think a lot of people have trouble understanding what the hell he’s doing,” says Molly, and Kott recalls that, in his first weeks working for Manchin, the senator turned to him as “we were walking to the floor and he said, ‘Buddy, if I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it.’... People think, ‘Oh, [West Virginia] has a high Democratic voter registration.] Well, a lot of those people aren’t Democrats anymore. They’re the old Kennedy, Johnson, Roosevelt Democrats who have switched parties. He doesn’t really care about party affiliation and is just focused on what he’s hearing from his constituents. And that’s basically how he handles his votes. He goes home most weekends. He talks to as many people as he can, comes back and decides how he’s gonna vote. And that’s basically what he does.”
As to the big Biden bill that Manchin blew up, Kott says that “I would bet there’s probably movement on some form of BBB before the August recess,” and stresses that Manchin liked lots of the things in the bill, like the childcare tax credit, even though he finally he voted down the whole package.
But, Molly says, “There were a lot of things that would benefit poor West Virginians” in the BBB bill Manchin shot down. “He may not like them, but they would have benefited some of the poorest people in America. I mean the childcare, it’s not for affluent people. These are government programs to help people who are barely scraping by which happens to be the population of his state. I just wonder how that works?”
“I think one of the other areas he wants to focus on is making sure that there is means testing it so that it does only go to those people,” says Kott. “I think that's been one of his concerns with a lot of these programs, is that it’s just blanket for everybody and not for people who need it most.”
Plus, Molly and co-host Andy Levy run through even more Republican fuckery, starting with Trump’s fear of fruit. “If you’re that worried about tomatoes, I guess you just assume that everything is very dangerous and you might as well give everyone guns,” jokes Molly.
By that logic, says Andy, “the only thing that can stop a bad man with a tomato is a good man with a gun.”
Finally, Marc Caputo of NBC explains what’s happening in the great state of Florida, where “conservatives are a lot more Trumpy” now.
“In 2016 when Donald Trump won people thought it was a fluke. And then in 2018, when Ron DeSantis won by less than half a point, they’re like, ‘OK, Andrew Gillum, his gubernatorial opponent was a flawed opponent.’ And then in 2020, Donald Trump won here by a bigger margin than Obama did in 2008 and that kind of got conservatives or Republicans to realize, ‘There is nothing to fear from Democrats anymore in Florida, let’s keep pushing the envelope.’ And so that’s where we are. We’re in some serious envelope-pushing.”
As to what Democrats can do, “No. 1, get a time machine,” cracks Caputo. “Go back in time and do your job. Do what Barack Obama did and the operation under him and register voters. The fact is that we are a growing state and there are lots of people moving in and out and those drives that were very successful for Obama in 2008 and 2012 just disappeared and they didn’t do the work. The other thing that Democrats in the state have a problem with which really became manifest in 2020 is with the Latino electorates, plural, in south Florida.
“It’s not just Cuban Americans, it’s Columbian Americans, it’s Venezuelan Americans, it’s Nicaraguan Americans. They do not like the modern movement as embodied in Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I cannot overstate how much damage it has caused Democrats to have had them as faces of the party when they have used the word ‘socialism’ in a positive way. If you say ‘socialist’ to someone whose family escaped socialism or leftist violence in Cuba, Columbia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, you’ve got a problem and they have a problem”—one that helps explain why Clinton won Miami-Dade by 29 percentage points while Biden won by just 7.
“The view of a lot of Latino voters that the Democratic Party is too socialist (and) that really came into play and Democrats really paid the price. And I’m not sure how fixable that is this election.”
Without a time machine, Caputo says, “The Democratic Party in the state and other places nationwide is also having a problem now with hemorrhaging white voters—more and more white voters more and more often are voting Republican. And 62, 63 percent of the voters in Florida are white. So if a Republican candidate carries more than 60 percent of the white vote and starts doing better with, say, 40 percent of the Latino vote, which makes up about 17 percent of the registered voters in Florida, that is a toxic combination for Democrats (and) a sweet spot for Republicans.
“So find a way to appeal more to the white voters. How to do that, I don't know—that's a fraught conversation to have but it is what it is. What is Democrats’ path back? Money, organization and candidates. If you look at 2020, Val Demings looks like a pretty attractive candidate in the state, but I’m not sure the money and the organization are there with her. If this were a different environment, like in 2018, when it was really a coin-toss election, yeah, now we're talking. But at least in the short term, I don’t see how that happens.”
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