While President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are busy pursuing a platform doomed to fail, Sen. Joe Manchin wants the Democratic Party to reset its priorities and focus on the things that actually matter to voters: rising inflation and the seemingly never-ending pandemic.
Asked again this week about his decision not to help his colleagues abolish, or at least reform, the filibuster to pass Biden’s Freedom to Vote Act, Manchin argued his party is focusing on the wrong things:
https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1483572002841673730?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
He’s right. Voters don’t care about Biden’s proposed electoral reform. In fact, a recent poll by Politico found that when voters were given three voting reform ideas and asked which should be “the top priority,” most respondents answered, “None of the above.”
The public has tuned out Biden’s voting rights push for two reasons. First, his hyperbolic rhetoric about Republicans’ so-called efforts to dismantle voting rights doesn’t hold up. Everyone who voted in one of the most recent elections knows it has never been easier to vote than it is now. This past presidential election saw record-high voter turnout among black, Hispanic, and white people. Even in Georgia, which has become the villain in Democrats’ voter suppression myth, minority voters turned out in higher numbers during the 2020 and 2021 elections than in years past.
Second, the public is dealing with two very big obstacles that affect their lives on a daily basis: inflation and COVID-19. It’s a bit difficult to take Democrats’ claims about our dying democracy seriously when those same lawmakers don’t seem to care at all about the things making it more difficult for people to live normally. Inflation has accelerated to 7% in the last month, which means prices are rising and workers’ paychecks aren’t going as far as they used to. At the same time, COVID-19 restrictions and mandates that refuse to go away have upended their children’s education and even threatened their livelihoods.
But not one Democrat in Congress besides Manchin wants to focus heavily on those problems or maybe even acknowledge that those problems exist. We’re barreling toward a recession and getting sucked into a mass mania, and Democrats want to instead focus on federalizing an election process that works just fine for the vast majority of people. Talk about out of touch.
If Democrats were smart, they would take Manchin’s advice and change their priorities. If they don’t, the public will do it for them during the midterm elections.
