 A new morning console poll has found that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin's popularity among his voters has spiked. And it's spiked by a lot. We're talking 17 percentage points and this is the largest spike of any US senator. So Joe Manchin, that Joe Manchin, the evil Joe Manchin is getting more popular. And he's not just getting more popular now because of this poll. He is one of the most popular senators in America right up there at the top with Bernie Sanders. So the question is, does evil pay off? And the answer is yeah, it probably does. But what's happening here? Because in West Virginia, when you look at public opinion polls from 2021, well, it indicated that they supported Build Back Better, which is the legislation that Joe Manchin blocked. So theoretically, they should be angry at him. And he should be getting less popular, but somehow he's getting more popular. Well, there's multiple things going on here. First and foremost, it seems as if support for Build Back Better started to taper off at the beginning of this year. A Remington research poll conducted in late January found that 72% of West Virginian voters supported Manchin's decision to obstruct Build Back Better. And that's a contradiction considering that in late August, as talks for Build Back Better were taking place, a data for progress poll found that 68% of West Virginian voters either strongly or somewhat supported the Build Back Better agenda. And when you look at individual provisions within Build Back Better, they are all very popular. In fact, most of these provisions have majority support, expanding Medicare, Universal Pre-K, clean energy investments. These are all strongly or somewhat supported by the people of West Virginia. Why is he getting more popular if he's seemingly doing the opposite of what his constituents want? Are the people of West Virginia masochistic? Do they like when their own senator spits in their faces? Are they uninformed? What's happening here? And it's actually pretty interesting to see the results here. This explanation is actually really easy. He is gaining more support with Republicans as he loses support with his Democratic base. So as Alex Griffin of Mediaite explains, Morning Consult's Eli Yoakley noted Monday that the senator's posturing has paid off as 57% of West Virginia voters approve of Manchin's job performance up from 40% during the first quarter of 2021. Manchin's soaring approval rating was the biggest jump of any U.S. senator since Biden took office with John Thune coming in second with an 11-point jump. Manchin's double-digit approval rating improvement over the course of Biden's tenure is a rarity when compared with other incumbents. Just three of them, John Thune, Lisa Murkowski, and Alex Padilla of California have seen comparable improvement in their standing Yoakley explains of Manchin's rare achievement. The driving force behind Manchin's boost came from West Virginia Republicans. At the beginning of Biden's time in office, Manchin held only a 35% approval rating with Republicans in his state, the largest voting block in a state Donald Trump won in 2020 by almost 40 points. Today, Manchin's approval rating with Republicans in West Virginia stands at 69% nice. His approval rating with Democrats meanwhile declined from 63% to 44%. Manchin's improving fortunes in a seat he has held since 2010 have now landed him among the top 10 most popular U.S. senators. Thune, Bernie Sanders, and John Barrasso are the three most popular while Mitch McConnell, Ron Johnson, and Susan Collins are the three most unpopular senators. So it's not as perplexing when you actually dive into the details. Democrats don't like him as much as they did previously, but Republicans, they see that he obstructed Joe Biden's agenda and they like that he is doing that. I mean, they approve of his performance. Now these Republicans, I would argue would probably still vote for a real Republican as opposed to someone who's a Democrat that does Republican things because these Republican voters like the modern Republican Party is full of psychopaths, right? So they don't want someone who just pretends to be a Republican. They want a tried and true reliable Kool-Aid drinker. They don't want someone who's going to agree with Democrats ever. They want someone frothing at the mouth, shitting their pants, talking about fascism openly almost at this point. That's who they want. They want an insurrectionist. So if Joe Manchin thinks that he's going to win by winning over Republican support and doesn't think that the Republican base will turn on him in favor of a real Republican, we'll have to wait and see. But I mean losing support from the people who specifically got you elected doesn't necessarily seem like the best electoral strategy, but that's what Manchin has seen, right? He obstructed President Biden's agenda, build back better, and his constituents don't like that. So his approval rating decreased with Democrats, but his net approval rating is overall up. So he's popular because there's enough conservative Democrats who agree with him, and there's enough Republicans who now approve of him to where it's kind of like this perfect mix of dumb people, uninformed people, just liking that he's stopping Biden from doing anything, the bare minimum when it comes to climate change legislation, expanding Medicare, things specifically that would help these Republicans in West Virginia, they're against it. Probably because, you know, really the ethos of the GOP in modern times is triggering the libs. And Joe Manchin absolutely triggered the libs. He blocked the entirety of Biden's agenda. So they liked that. And because he delivered on that one thing that they care about, well, it doesn't matter if they're still going to be in poverty and not have access to an education, not have healthcare. Fuck it. As long as Democrats are mad, I can die happy, might die poor, and not be able to retire, but I die happy nonetheless, knowing that they're unhappy. I mean, I don't know, I'm obviously speculating a little bit, but it just shows you that when you are super evil, Republicans usually support you. And I say usually because Mitch McConnell is the most effective Republican, perhaps in modern times, he's done more harm, been more effective at actually instituting the GOP's agenda than any other senator. And yet he's one of the least popular people, but yet he still gets elected. You know, it doesn't make sense. Americans are one of the most uninformed populations in the world, I feel like, because they hate their Congress. They hate all of the governing institutions, but they keep electing people who are demonstrable failures, people who don't care about them, people who have been proven to be corrupt. How many articles have we seen about Joe Manchin talking about how his policies that he fights for as a representative have been almost exclusively to the benefit of his own coal company to enrich himself? And yet they still elect him time after time after time. So it's frustrating, right? Because you have these self-serving politicians and everyone knows that money runs everything in DC, and all of these politicians only care about is, you know, their own careers and their reelection, but yet they keep electing these people. They consistently vote for the out-of-touch incumbent in primaries over the insurgent who actually wants to do good things. It's frustrating, right? I feel like a lot of this is a failure on the part of media, but what's going to happen is the message is going to be, you see, people like Manchin because he governed as a moderate. It doesn't matter that he was an obstructionist and didn't even allow moderate policies to get through because that's what Build Back Better is. These are incrementalist approaches to catastrophic issues facing our society, but he wouldn't even allow incrementalism. The moderate approach is no longer tolerable with the right in America today, but the narrative is going to be, oh, we'll see. Joe Manchin did what Republicans wanted and he's more popular. So of course, other Democrats should do what he does, and that's how you get popular. Pretend to be a Republican and that's your ticket to victory in the United States. They think that that's actually what's going to get them elected and this isn't hyperbole. This is what overpaid Democratic Party operatives tell them time and again, but it's a failure. What matters is getting out the vote, making sure that your base is galvanized, making sure that you offer them things, and that's not always going to work, right? I mean, West Virginia had the opportunity to support Paula Jean Swaring, not once, but twice, right? She tried to primary him back in 2018. She lost. She successfully ran a Democratic Party primary again in 2020 and was up against Shelley Moore Capito and she lost. So both times, you know, West Virginians, they had the option of supporting someone who was explicitly saying, I want to fight for you. I want to give you healthcare and education. And they said, no, I want the Republican who's going to do nothing and get rich off of making us suffer. So that's not just people being irrational. That's them being uninformed and not actually knowing what's happening, right? So overall, we need to train people in the United States to understand what's happening politically. We need to give people training on media literacy, but it's just an uphill battle because the right-wing misinformation machine has duped people into believing that voting against their own best interest is what they should be doing and they do it consistently time and time again. So even if Republicans are Republican because they like when Republicans do Republican things and therefore they support Joe Manchin because he's doing what they usually like, it's still irrational for them because they're supporting someone who's fucking them over essentially. So I don't know what to say. I mean, being evil sometimes pays off, right? Not necessarily for Kyrsten Sinema, but if you're John Thune and Joe Manchin, you can basically tell your constituents to go fuck themselves and then they'll be like, oh, well, thank you more, please. Yes, daddy, please give me more pain and suffering. I'll approve of you more if you do that. Spit in my face while you're at it. Step on me, please. It's just what a dystopian hellhole we live in.