Candidates Joe Manchin and Phil Bredesen are at the center of fight to win back the Senate – and a world away from the slate of diverse candidates running across America for the House

Joe Manchin is shouting in the middle of a job fair. It’s in an exhibition space at a community college in Parkersburg, West Virginia, an industrial town on the Ohio river. He is going booth to booth to booth, making conversation and taking selfies.

Manchin has come to one table that provides office workers to companies on a provisional basis and is convinced that someone he just met is a perfect fit. He starts asking his staffers to find the young man who was looking for an accounting job and direct him over to the booth.

West Virginia Republicans look to 'Kavanaugh bump' to fire turnout Read more

The Democratic senator could have come out of a lab for politicians. The 71-year-old Manchin has salt and pepper hair and just the right amount of twang. He comes across as one of God’s natural retail politicians, treats every voter like a friend. Most return the adoration, although there are a few rolled eyes. High schoolers ask him to come to their football game and grown men excitedly pile next to him to pose for a photograph.

However, less than 24 hours after Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate judiciary committee, he kept getting asked about Brett Kavanaugh – the conservative supreme court pick whom Manchin would eventually vote for.

West Virginia was a traditionally Democratic state for generations. However, it has pivoted on a dime. A former bastion of blue-collar New Deal Democrats it has become a Republican stronghold based on issues like guns, abortion and the “war on coal”. Although West Virginia has long been economically populist, it is socially conservative and the coal industry occupies a key place in the state’s psyche.

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West Virginia is one of two races – alongside one in Tennessee – that are crucial to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the Senate in next month’s midterm elections. Democrats probably need to win in both West Virginia and Tennessee to have a chance of flipping the slim 51-49 Republican majority in the Senate. Democratic control of the upper chamber would mean that they could block not just legislation but Trump appointees to office, including the courts, as well.

Thus Democratic fortunes in the Senate rest on the unlikely shoulders of two septuagenarian white men in states that Donald Trump won overwhelmingly. These two older white men are a world away from the slate of diverse candidates that the Democrats are running across America for the House.

Manchin and Bredesen are both willing to embrace Trump at times and practice a Clintonian brand of politics

Although much has been made of the so-called “blue wave” that Democrats are counting on in the midterms to win control of the House of Representatives, their task in taking back the Senate is a much stiffer challenge. And in the centre of that challenge are Manchin in West Virginia and Phil Bredesen in Tennessee.

These two candidates differ markedly from the new slate of Democratic candidates who are rushing to embrace progressive causes like Medicare for All, a $15-an-hour minimum wage and flirt with the concept of abolishing Ice (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Manchin and Bredesen are from a different school of centrist Democrats. They are also both willing to embrace Trump at times and practice a Clintonian brand of politics where they look at both political parties in Washington and proclaim “a plague upon both your houses”.

Both men supported the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the supreme court – the two most prominent Democrats to do so.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Senator Joe Manchin, right, Democrat of West Virginia who is running for re-election voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court. Photograph: Mary Calvert/Reuters

A clear sign of why Manchin eventually backed Kavanaugh was evident in Parkersburg where attendees were invariably coming up to Manchin to urge him to support the embattled nominee – while the West Virginia senator was staying perched precariously on the fence. To one woman, he simply laid out the recent history of judicial nomination fights on Capitol Hill. He said Democratic anger on the issue was rooted in the showdown over Merrick Garland that Republicans “wouldn’t even meet him and that’s what makes ’em mad”. Manchin went on to point to fault on “both sides” and insisted “we want to get everyone back together”.

Speaking to the Guardian afterwards in a public park before a veterans event, Manchin pointed out “there’s still more Democrats than there are anything else in West Virginia. The bottom line is they got upset after it got to the point that the Washington Democrats forgot about the rural Democrats.” Manchin, who is the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, instead tried to emphasize his independence. “I don’t care whether [you’re a Democrat or a Republican] … it’s about West Virginia first and that’s where I’ve always been.”

His Republican opponent, Patrick Morrisey, is almost the antithesis of Manchin. While Manchin is a native West Virginian who grew up as the star high school quarterback, Morrisey is a New Jersey native who worked as staffer and lobbyist on Capitol Hill before moving to the Mountain State and beating a five-term incumbent to become the first Republican state attorney general since before the New Deal.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump shakes hands with Republican candidate Patrick Morrisey during a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, on 29 September. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The Republican regularly branded his opponent as “dishonest Washington liberal” and painted him as a pawn of the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer. Trump has appeared regularly with Morrisey and the West Virginia Republican could not name one area of disagreement with him.

“I want to emphasize my areas of commonality with the president because the body of his work has been very impressive for the people of West Virginia,” insisted the Republican Senate candidate. “No one is an ideological twin of another person. President Trump has been a strong ally for West Virginia and we’re going to keep emphasizing that.”

The message may not be cutting through in polls. Manchin has maintained a steady lead in West Virginia and has consistently been hitting Morrisey on his past as a pharmaceutical lobbyist, an important issue in a state that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic as well on the Republican’s opposition to Obamacare and the effect that would have on West Virginians with pre-existing conditions.

However, while that message and approach may be working for Manchin in West Virginia, it may not be as successful in Tennessee.

As a fellow centrist Democrat, or blue dog, Bredesen is running a similar race to Manchin. However, although his Republican opponent, Marsha Blackburn, is just as ardent a Trump fan as Morrisey, the state has surprisingly little in common with West Virginia save the Appalachian mountains and a blowout margin for Trump in 2016.

Tennessee is divided into three parts by the swoop of the Tennessee river, which rises in the eastern part of the state, descends into Alabama before emerging to flow northward into the Ohio river in Paducah, Kentucky. The key battlefield is middle Tennessee, the central part of the state penned inside the river.

If it’s, ‘Do you want to send Phil Bredesen or Marsha Blackburn to Washington?’ I think I can win that Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen

Centered around Nashville, the region is economically thriving. Nashville is a tourist hub that has attracted Fortune 500 companies and the population of the metro area has doubled since 1990. One of the key figures in this process was Bredesen. First as mayor of Nashville and then as Tennessee’s governor, the 74-year-old played a key role in reviving the city, attracting pro sports teams and reviving Tennessee’s once sleepy capital city.

A wealthy former CEO of a healthcare company and transplant from the north, Bredesen long cut an almost disconcertingly moderate figure in the state.

He has tried to run a campaign that avoids national politics as much as possible. In one television ad, Bredesen looks squarely at the camera and says: “Look, I’m not running against Donald Trump.” Instead, he paints himself as a bipartisan problem solver and deflects any talk of the Democrats taking control of the Senate. “The chances of my party of being in the majority are minuscule,” he said in a debate.

Instead of making it about party labels or national figures, Bredesen has tried to keep things local in a state that has been strongly Republican in recent decades. In an interview with Politico, the former governor said if the race is about, “‘do you want to send a Democrat or Republican to Washington?’ I would lose. If it’s, ‘Do you want to send Phil Bredesen or Marsha Blackburn to Washington?’ I think I can win that.”

In contrast, his opponent Marsha Blackburn, a 16-year-veteran of Capitol Hill, is fully embracing Trump. Blackburn, who uses the masculine title of congressman, is a bomb thrower who long irritated many establishment Republicans in Tennessee dating back to her time in the state legislature.

Blackburn, who has been a frequent cable television presence, is a fervent social conservative. She has been an implacable opponent of abortion and even co-sponsored legislation, prompted by conspiracy theories about then President Barack Obama, to force presidential candidates to disclose their birth certificates.

During the campaign, she has consistently echoed Trump’s rhetoric. On television, she slams Bredesen for opposing the Trump travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries and for his skepticism about the efficacy of a wall on the US-Mexico border.

Blackburn’s hard-right policies even prompted an intervention by Taylor Swift, a Tennessee resident in the race. Swift endorsed Bredesen in an Instagram post and cited the Republican’s record on gay rights and women’s issues in doing so.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump and the Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn during a campaign rally on 1 October in Johnson City, Tennessee. Photograph: Sean Rayford/Getty Images

However, demographic changes in the state and not its pop singers represent her key vulnerability. Her home base, the well-to-do Nashville suburb of Williamson, was one of only four in the state where Hillary Clinton did better than Barack Obama in the general election and was the sole holdout from Trump in the primary, when it went for Marco Rubio.

Although Nashville suburbs are still solidly Republican, that is starting to change ever so modestly and in the long term are trending towards Democrats. This combined with Blackburn’s weak personal poll numbers has given Democrats hope.

Scott Golden, the chair of the Tennessee Republican party told the Guardian, “there are no moderates left in Washington DC … it is a partisan team sport.” He cited the divisive vote over Kavanaugh.

In recent weeks Tennessee voters have seen the race through the same lens. In the aftermath of the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, Blackburn has surged while before the showdown, Bredesen held a narrow lead.

For Republicans, the hope is these highly charged and highly partisan national issues can trump the brands carefully built by both Bredesen and Manchin over decades in public office. The two men both came out in support of Kavanaugh’s nomination, trying to thwart one potential line of attack and cool the partisan enthusiasm of the Trump voters whom they will be relying on in November. The result was that one major Democratic Super Pac, Priorities USA, announced that it would no longer be supporting the two Senate candidates in November. The decision is simply another indication that their politics as moderate, red state Democrats may increasingly be outliers in a party that is moving leftwards.

Many liberal activists have argued that leftwing candidates in diverse states like Andrew Gillum in Florida or Beto O’Rourke in Texas are their party’s future. But for now, in a Senate map that is tilted towards red states, Democrats have no other options but to embrace throwbacks to a moderate past if they have any hopes of regaining the majority.