A few good reasons to vote for Manchin in November:

Link to tweet

But Manchin’s vote should call old party strategies into question. If the Democratic Party can’t count on its own senators for votes as morally pivotal as the Kavanaugh confirmation, its big tent might just be too big. Its tolerance for conservative members might not be as pragmatic as it appears, either. Since Trump took office in 2016, a number of Democrats to Manchin’s left have performed surprisingly well so-called red states, winning some unexpected primary elections and polling well against Republican candidates. The Democratic candidate for Florida governor, Andrew Gillum, has been campaigning on Medicare for All and still leads Republican Ron DeSantis by four points in a recent Florida Southern College poll. In Georgia’s gubernatorial race, progressive Stacey Abrams has locked Republican Brian Kemp in a dead heat. In other races, recent polling suggested that progressive congressional candidates Jess King and Randy Bryce, running in Pennsylvania’s 11th congressional district and Wisconsin’s first congressional district respectively, have closed gaps with their Republican opponents to single digits. And in one of the year’s most surprising contests, Democrat Beto O’Rourke has trapped Ted Cruz in a race for his political life.

Even in West Virginia, support for Trump doesn’t necessarily guarantee support for down-ballot Republican candidates, or for conservative politics as a category. Trump won 68 percent of the vote in 2016. But less than half of the state’s registered voters actually voted for Trump. The president won 489,671 of the state’s registered voters, out of a 2016 total of 1,274,887. In the state’s conservative third congressional district, Democrat Richard Ojeda has managed to turn his race against Republican Carol Miller into a true toss-up. That’s partly due to Ojeda’s particular idiosyncrasies: Like many of his would-be constituents, he voted for Trump, though it’s a decision he says he now regrets. As a state legislator, his unyielding support for the teachers’ strike that gripped the state in February and March earned him an energized following that very well could put him in office. Politically, Ojeda now has more in common with Bernie Sanders than he does with Joe Manchin – and that tilt to the left has hardly harmed his prospects.