What Joe Manchin's Senate can deliver

A bigger deal than you might think

Happy Thursday, folks!

As I predicted in my predictions post, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both won their races for United States Senate in Georgia. These races are interesting on their own terms, most superficially for the weird role Ossoff has played in Trump-era politics but I think more fundamentally because of Warnock. For a long time in American politics, the view was that African-American candidates faced really big obstacles to winning in majority-white constituencies. In the post-Obama era, it’s time for Democrats to change their thinking on this. Black Democrats like Warnock (but also Obama and Cory Booker before him) are more likely than white ones to be rooted in institutions like churches that give them a better chance than white Dems of breaking out of the BA Bubble.

Just look at the patriotic framing (“… because this is America…”) that Warnock gave to his family story in this speech.