A progressive PAC, No Excuses PAC, has started their search to find more progressive candidates to challenge centrist Democrat senators.
The group, founded by Saikat Chakrabarti, Corbin Trent, and Zack Exley, the first two of whom previously worked for Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is looking to find candidates to challenge Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, according to Politico. Both of them will be facing reelection in 2024.
Manchin and Sinema have become roadblocks in the eyes of progressives, as they have stopped the Democrats and Biden administration from enacting a more progressive agenda. The two have repeatedly refused to support the ending of the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote threshold for most legislation. By removing the filibuster, legislation could be passed with a simple majority vote, and the Democrats have the tiebreaking vote in Vice President Kamala Harris, as long as the entire caucus votes together.
“The only real way to pressure any of these folks and hold them accountable to their promises is to threaten their power and threaten the seat that they hold and threaten their reelection,” Chakrabarti said. “We sort of have this theory that the voters in Arizona, and the voters in West Virginia, would care more about action, they care more about jobs and their community and money in their pockets than they do about an arcane Senate rule called the filibuster.”
Exley predicted the progressive group could raise “many, many millions of dollars” if the two centrist Democrats are the deciding votes to keep the filibuster alive should a vote come to the floor.
“If it comes down to an actual vote on modifying the filibuster and it just won’t pass because of these two, then people are going to be so angry that there will be that national base of donors who really, really love to donate to a campaign to unseat these guys,” Exley said. “It won’t be any problem to raise many, many millions of dollars in that scenario.”
Manchin, who has spent the last ten years in the Senate after serving as West Virginia’s governor for eight years, appears to be a tougher fighter than Sinema when it comes to the state of West Virginia. The Mountain State has not gone blue during a presidential election since President Bill Clinton won it in 1996. Comparatively, Arizona appears to be becoming a purple state as Arizonans are currently represented by two Democrats in the Senate, Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly, for the first time in 1952.
