Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) has seen the largest job approval rating improvement of any U.S. senator over the past year, according to a new Morning Consult poll.
The poll, which was conducted between January 1 and March 31, found that 57 percent of West Virginia voters approve of Manchin’s performance, up from 40 percent during the first quarter of 2021. The improvement was driven by increased support from Republicans; Manchin has doubled his approval rating among GOP voters in the state over the past year to 69 percent.
Most of the improvement in Manchin’s approval rating has come since the third quarter of 2021, before he came out against President Biden’s Build Back Better plan.
In December, Manchin said that he “cannot vote to continue with” Biden’s nearly $2 trillion social spending plan, dashing Democrats’ hopes that the moderate Democrat could be persuaded to support the bill and therefore effectively killing the legislation.
“I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t. I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there,” Manchin said at the time.
Manchin later added that Biden “has a lot of logs in the fire,” including Covid, inflation, and the $29 trillion federal debt, and suggested at the time that that’s what lawmakers should focus on.
“When you have these things coming at you the way they are right now, I’ve always said this, Bret, if I can’t go home to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it,” he told Fox News host Bret Baier.
However, Manchin’s approval has suffered among West Virginia Democrats. The latest poll shows that 54 percent of Democrats in the state disapprove of Manchin, up from 32 percent this time last year. Yet his approval rating has risen among independents over the same period of time, increasing from 31 percent to 50 percent.
“It turns out that Joe Manchin knows more about West Virginia voters than D.C. strategists,” former Manchin aide Jonathan Kott told Morning Consult. “The amount of interactions he has with his voters I don’t think can be paralleled by other members.”
Manchin is now the eighth most popular senator. Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R., S.D.), Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Senator John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) topped Morning Consult’s list of most popular senators.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) is the most unpopular.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.), who has also come out against some of Biden’s agenda alongside Manchin, has not seen a similar boost in her approval rating among her constituents. Instead, her approval rating has slightly fallen from 46 percent to 44 percent, while her disapproval rating has jumped from 35 percent to 42 percent. Morning Consult attributes the lack of support to “souring among Democrats and a lack of bounce among independents.”