To win the runoffs, Democrats need to counter Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, but Senator Joe Manchin is absolutely the wrong messenger for Georgia
It took about a day and a half after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris officially won the 2020 Presidential Election for Twitter Democrats to decide that they were tired of being upstaged by Republicans’ disarray. On audio leaked from the postmortem House Democratic Caucus call, the barely re-elected Rep. Abigail Spanberger blamed the progressive messaging of some of her fellow House Dems running as “socialists” for races that were lost (or narrowly won). Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, better known to both her supporters and detractors as AOC, immediately took to Twitter to, in some cases rather prematurely, hit back that these same house reps had done this to themselves by not spending enough on digital during a pandemic. As with most things AOC does, this was immediately pounced upon by the press. Even before all of the votes were counted in some of these districts, and some of the specific candidates she had criticized for their campaign strategy turned out to be victorious, she was interviewed by the New York Times, blaming them for their loss.
While her analysis of her colleagues’ digital strategy shouldn’t be entirely thrown out, particularly as campaigns may be staring down a midterm cycle in a still raging pandemic, if her intention was to rankle more mainstream Democrats, AOC truly overperformed. Perhaps it’s left-over pain from the 2016 election, wounds that have never fully healed because every discussion of why Hillary Clinton lost has frequently devolved into Very Online Cosplay Socialists shrieking “Bernie would have won!” for the last 4 years. Perhaps it’s because AOC’s fellow Squad member, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, in stepping to their small caucus’s defense, claimed personal credit for Biden’s victory in Michigan, even though Tlaib refused to endorsed him — claiming that her constituents wouldn’t have wanted her to do so. Perhaps it was just bound to come sooner or later as the Biden Coalition had lost the outward focus of their ire with Trump’s defeat. Whatever the reason, the moderate and liberal wings of the Very Online Democrats hit back with ferocity. For the most part, their general assessment and anger were justified. In some deep blue districts, progressive House members actually underperformed both their initial 2018 breakout elections and the more mainstream liberal Democrats at the top of the ticket, both of whom the Twitter left demonized for the last year and a half as a jailer and a cop, corporate neoliberals, or, worst of all, no different from Trump. Nor had they forgotten that, ever since the South Carolina primary secured the nomination for Biden, an army of Sanders/Warren/Squad supporters attacked the true base of the party, Black voters, and Black women especially, as ignorant, “low information” voters who voted against their own interests, and who shouldn’t even have a say in the primary process if they lived in a red state.
With two Senate seats from Georgia still in play, the argument immediately shifted to how AOC and the Squad were going to “kill us” in the runoff. Twitter moderates and liberals were desperate to amplify a contrasting voice to “prove” that not all Democrats are socialists married to Defund the Police and Medicare for All (while, it should be added, shooting themselves in the foot by quote RTing and replying en masse to that very messaging, ensuring that it would spread and continue spreading across the internet — messaging discipline is not the party’s strong suit). Rather than drowning out the noise by amplifying actual Georgia Democrats like Stacey Abrams, who is universally beloved and credited with delivering the state for Biden, or a high profile Democrat from a neighboring state, like South Carolinian and House Whip Jim Clyburn, who at least is a) Southern, b) Black, and c) also recently on record with a vociferous refutation of the Squad, coastal Dems hastily united to elevate a television interview and the tweets of… West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin?
As a born and raised Southern Democrat who has lived in Georgia, and whose father lived in West Virginia for several years, I find this choice absolutely baffling. But it’s emblematic of the most vocal liberals and moderates having an embarrassingly deficient knowledge of the states they don’t rely on every year to win the presidency.
Allow me to drop some data:
Georgia’s white population comprise a bare majority at 51.8%, with Black Georgia residents comprising a large, tipping point minority (31.9%), and comprising a majority of the state’s Democrats. On the other hand, West Virginia’s population is 92% white and a mere 3.77% Black — only 68,000 residents in a state where Trump won every single county in 2016 and 2020. Even in the unlikely event that all Black West Virginians a) were of voting age, b) were registered to vote, c) voted, and d) voted Democrat, they still would not be able to swing an election where the spread was 300,000 votes. Georgia also has a significant population of AAPI (4%), Hispanic (9.71%), and multiracial (2.17%) residents, whereas the only other racial or ethnic group that crests to even 1% in West Virginia is Hispanic (1.42%).
Massive disparities in racial and ethnic diversity are not all that comprises the chasm of difference between the two states. The population of West Virginia (1.81 million) is not only dwarfed by Georgia, the eighth most popular state in the union (10.5 million), but by the population of Atlanta metro area alone (6 million). Georgia has five more major metropolitan centers — Augusta, Columbus, Macon, Savannah, and Athens — all of which are three to seven times more populous than the 5 largest cities in West Virginia. Augusta and Columbus each have a higher population alone than all of Charleston, Huntington, Morgantown, Parkersburg, and Wheeling, West Virginia combined.
The most common job for a West Virginian is in the trucking industry, with cashier a close second. In Georgia, it’s the restaurant and service industry — indicative of a thriving tourism industry and a population with leisure time and money — with elementary or secondary education right behind. The difference in median annual income for the two states is $14,000, a difference that ranks Georgia 29th in the nation’s states and territories, and West Virginia 52nd, behind Guam, whose economy is built almost entirely on a single industry (tourism).
The South is the most LGBTQIA heavy region in the country at 4.5%, and Georgia shares that percentage — second only to Florida with 4.7%. The state is neck and neck for the highest population of trans Americans at 0.75% — while this is not a significant voting bloc, it does mean that Georgia voters are much more likely to know, be friends or family with, and care about the rights of a trans person they love. West Virginia, on the other hand, has an estimated 4% LGBTQIA population, and is 42nd of 50 states in trans population.
Combine all of this with Georgia’s younger (by 8 years) median age, and you have much more fertile ground for the Democratic Party than rocky and politically perilous West Virginia.
The two states vary tremendously geographically, and even historically have almost no economic, industrial, cultural, or political similarities. Literally the only thing they have in common throughout the history of the United States is that slavery was legal in both states — and West Virginia didn’t even join the Confederacy.
Oh, well, and that Northeastern and West Coast liberals seem to think that anti-choice, anti-LGBTQIA, anti-environmentalist, anti-DREAMer Joe Manchin would appeal to both of them. As soon as Manchin’s interview came out, Twitter was awash with people saying that the Senator was “helping us” to win Georgia. Some even went so far as to say “if we take Georgia’s Senate seats, you can thank Joe Manchin.”
Excuse me?
Despite the fact that coastal liberals only ever think about Georgia when it’s displayed on an electoral college map every 4 years, painted with a binary option of red or blue, it is not, and hasn’t been, a deep red state in the way that Manchin’s is. Stacey Abrams and her colleagues just proved, only days ago, that there are enough Democrats in the state to flip Georgia blue and what you have to do is turn them out — not dangle a conservative Democrat from a whole other region to entice mythical conservative Southern independents who might come out in a runoff election to vote Democratic if we can only “prove” that we’re not socialists.
A runoff election isn’t a persuasion election. It’s a base turnout election. Making Manchin the voice of the Democratic party, especially when he unequivocally dismissed progressive policies largely supported by the young voters who flipped the state for Biden, will also “kill us.” Under normal circumstances he is barely tolerated only because he continues to hold that seat in blood red West Virginia. Before this week, whenever he came up in political discourse, it was point out that he is an unreliable Democratic vote in the Senate for any policy other than healthcare — the sole reason that his constituents, who depend on the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, tolerate the (D) next to his name when they mark their ballots. By giving him the social media pulpit, we run the risk of implying to Georgia voters that even if Ossoff and Warnock are sent to Washington, Democrats still won’t have the votes to do anything once they get there — that the battle is already lost thanks to Joe Manchin.
If we lose Georgia, you can thank Joe Manchin.
Whatever I think of her good intentions, I have listened to Georgia Democrats on the ground in the state, particularly Black women voters, who insist that AOC’s messaging does need to be countered. There are plenty of out of state Senators whose politics are more in line with Georgia’s Democrats and whose counter messaging would be effective — Cory Booker, Brian Schatz, and Chris Coons are even good at Twitter! Or perhaps, and maybe this is a radical idea, we could simply amplify the message, policy, and profile of Reverend Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the excellent candidates actually running to serve the only people whose votes will matter on January 5th.