Sen. Joe Manchin is high on the list of incumbents whom Republicans are trying to unseat next year. But the West Virginia Democrat scored a major win in this week’s $1 trillion spending deal — and he has the GOP to thank for it.

Manchin isn’t the only one.


Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and other Democrats waging reelection battles in states won by President Donald Trump, are notching marketable accomplishments in the GOP-controlled Senate. It’s a break from the recent past, when Senate leaders sought to deny endangered incumbents from the other party any achievements or bipartisan street cred to tout back home.

And vulnerable Democrats seized the spotlight this week, repeatedly taking credit for securing a permanent extension of health benefits for coal miners in the government funding bill. “Ultimately, it was bipartisan, but for a long time, it was Democrats carrying the ball,” Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania said in an interview.

In fact, the red-state Democrats couldn’t have claimed their biggest victory so far this Congress without Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who also wanted a fix to help his own state’s miners.

But even though McConnell and the Trump White House are still shutting out the minority on big-ticket issues like health care and taxes, some at-risk Democrats are finding GOP partners for projects suited to their reelection bids.

The most popular ally for Trump-state Democrats is Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, whose own appetite for bipartisanship helped smooth his glide to reelection last year even as it frustrated some liberals who would have rather robbed him of wins.

Portman has worked with Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) on a regulatory reform plan and is courting more Democratic support. He regularly joins Brown’s calls for stronger trade enforcement. And he’s eyeing potential legislation with Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill that would build on their fruitful investigation into Backpage.com’s role in online sex trafficking.

Portman, who helped push for the miners’ aid package alongside West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, said he’s faced no arm-twisting from Republican leaders over giving endangered Democrats achievements that might bolster their standing in Trump states.

“I traditionally have worked across the aisle with members who are up,” Portman said in an interview, and Republican leaders “know I’m not going to back down.”

Trying to deter bipartisan collaboration with vulnerable members is “silly,” Portman added. “If we’re doing our jobs, focused on the right result, it’ll be good for all of us. Second, I don’t think the fact that I’ve introduced a bill [with a Democrat] is going to make any difference in an election.”

Teaming up on modest legislation doesn’t spark the inside-the-Beltway chatter that bipartisan collaboration on taxes or infrastructure might carry, but it can generate valuable news coverage for Democrats in their states.

When Trump signed Tester’s veterans’ health care bill last month, national news organizations paid little heed, but the Democrat drew a raft of positive headlines back home in Montana.

Bipartisanship is “not dead,” Tester insisted in a brief interview, pointing to the veterans bill as proof that “there’s already been some good work done.”

Republicans previously tried to deny any perceived victory to their electoral targets, with former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) pushing to stop a vote on an energy efficiency proposal — co-authored by Portman — that would have benefited Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) in their 2014 face-off. Some Democrats also recall getting similar pressure from on high not to team up with vulnerable Republicans as they pushed to retake the Senate in 2016.

The absence of such strong-arm tactics so far this year is partly due to the still-nascent stage of the midterm campaign.

“It’s too early to really make an assumption” that red-state Senate Democrats will have further reelection fodder, one Senate GOP aide said. “You might see a few things here and there that they’re a co-sponsor on with a Republican counterpart, but I seriously doubt they’ll have many big wins to tout.”

Republicans also aren’t sweating Democrats’ victory lap on miners’ aid because they don’t think it will be enough to save their opponents from a campaign-trail hammering over the Obama administration’s regulatory clampdown on the coal industry.

“You can’t support a war on coal for years and then hope to erase voters’ memories by signing on to the majority leader’s efforts to permanently extend health care for retired miners,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart wrote in an email. “Constituents are smarter than that. The Democrats’ scheme is like painting one window of a dilapidated building before putting it up for sale — people just aren’t going to buy it.”

However, letting imperiled Democrats in states Trump won assert their political influence also gives them a chance to remind voters that incumbency has its benefits.

Asked whether the door would close to more bipartisanship efforts as 2018 draws nearer, Manchin urged GOP colleagues to keep working with him.

“[Republicans] know one thing, that there’s one senator here that always talked to them when they were in cycle, if it was a good idea: It was me,” Manchin told POLITICO.

“If somebody signed on to a bill that was bipartisan and it was a good idea, it was me,” added Manchin, who has played an uncharacteristic political hardball to draw attention to retired coal miners’ plight. “If they wanted to look at someone who never campaigned against them and never raised money against them to try to defeat them, it was me.”

This week’s victory on miners’ aid could prove hard to replicate when lawmakers start similar talks on a fix for the looming shortfall in retired coal workers’ pension fund. Democrats say they’ve secured a commitment to work with Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah on the issue before next year, but as the midterm election approaches, partisan tension is likely to spike.

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“I think pensions will be a challenge, because look how difficult health care was,” Casey said. “[Republicans] made that much more difficult than it could have been.”

And not every moderate Democrat is comfortable with counting on victories more minor than miners’ aid. McCaskill lamented in an interview that even red-state Democrats whose votes might be winnable for the White House remain frozen out of the bigger policy debates.

“While there are some individual members that are still working across the aisle, and I’d count Rob [Portman] among them, it’s frustrating for me because I think I have a well-deserved reputation for doing that,” McCaskill said. “I think I would be considered by most of my Republican colleagues one of the moderates, but no one’s talking to us Democrats on the big stuff they’re doing.”

