“This election is hopefully going to be about me,” Sen. John Tester says of how he’ll run for a fourth term on the ticket with President Joe Biden. “They’re going to try to make it about somebody else that’s not me.”
Francis Chung/POLITICO
Among the three red-state Democrats, Manchin is most akin to Collins in terms of keeping their distance from their parties’ presidential nominees. Manchin didn’t support Obama in 2012, nearly pulled his backing from Hillary Clinton in 2016, and though he supported Biden in 2020 he seems unlikely to be vocal either way in 2024.
“In West Virginia, you know, it doesn’t make a difference,” Manchin said. “Joe Biden’s going to get beat so bad no matter what in my state. It’s just me. I’m not going to be campaigning for or against anybody else.”
Divided government will test Manchin’s sway. He’s championing an energy permitting overhaul that fell short last year and pushing the Biden administration on rolling out the energy, tax and health care bill he helped write last year. But each of the party’s three red-state senators has a prominent perch to generate more accomplishments before they’d face voters: Brown chairs the Banking Committee, Manchin chairs the Energy Committee and Tester chairs the Veterans Affairs Committee.
Meanwhile, Republicans will look to limit the three senators’ successes and drive a wedge between Biden and Senate Democrats. The chamber’s Republicans are plotting disapproval votes on federal regulations regarding sustainable investments, trucking emissions, water regulations and Pentagon environmental performance.
Biden will certainly veto those GOP efforts if they prevail, but their political intention is clear: Squeeze Democrats. Simultaneously, those votes offer an opportunity for Senate Democrats to separate themselves from the president.
“There are obviously [Democratic incumbents] who are paying attention to politics back home,” said Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.).
As challenging as 2024’s map is for Senate Democrats, it’s not as rough as 2018, when they had to defend 10 seats Trump had just won. Biden’s presidential win shored up Democrats’ brand in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and if they can win those states at the presidential level again, it’s good news for their Senate hopefuls.
That puts a more intense focus on Ohio, West Virginia and Montana as the states that will decide the majority. And Republicans are looking at the basic math: In 2020, Trump won West Virginia by 39 points, Montana by 16 points and Ohio by 8 points.
The rest of next year’s battleground Senate races are in states Biden won, albeit in some cases quite narrowly: Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Democrats in those states are far more likely to run with Biden than as a check on him — though the Copper State could see a three-way race if independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema seeks a second term.
Summing up her reelection theme in an interview, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) cited Biden’s recent State of the Union: “Between the House, the Senate and this president, there has been exceptional accomplishment. But we haven’t finished the job.”
Even in Ohio, Brown said he’d “assume” he’ll campaign with Biden even if the president is unlikely to consider his state a must-win.
“I run my own race, and my own brand. So, I’m not going to run from Biden,” Brown said. “He’s also delivered more than any president in recent history.”
Even Manchin sounds much like Brown or Baldwin when discussing what Democrats accomplished during the previous Congress. But because Biden is unpopular in West Virginia, it’s up to him to convince voters what they got out of it.
“There’s more coming for the state of West Virginia because of what we’ve done. Now, they’re not going to give that credit to a Democratic president,” Manchin said.
Manchin endorsed Collins in 2020, when the Mainer did not support Trump and largely ran on her lengthy record. Her reelection race initially flared with liberal outrage over her vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and culminated in one of the most expensive Senate races in the country.
Through it all, Collins trailed in the polls as then-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer mounted an aggressive bid to flip her seat. Yet in the end, Democrats fell short trying to nationalize the race in a state with few transient voters.
Offering some advice from that experience to Manchin, Brown and Tester — all of them similarly well-known back home, just like her — Collins put it this way: “People know me personally. And when Chuck Schumer was running vicious ads, people just didn’t believe it.”