The New Yorker:

Joe Manchin, the senior senator from West Virginia, has announced that he will not run for reëlection. A 2021 Profile of the Democrat asked whether his search for common ground could wreck his party’s agenda.

By Evan Osnos 

On a frosty night in February, Joe Manchin III, the senior senator from West Virginia, invited a few colleagues over for dinner aboard the houseboat he docks on the Potomac. In the past, opponents have sought to highlight the vessel for political effect; a 2018 advertisement by the National Republican Senatorial Committee called it a “$700,000 D.C. luxury yacht.” (In response, Manchin’s office reported that he bought it, used, for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.) The boat—which he named Almost Heaven, after John Denver’s description of West Virginia in “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—resembles a small ferry; it is sixty-five feet long and boxy, with tinted windows. It serves as a residence on the nights he is in Washington, but also as a political prop. For voters who dislike the government, it allows Manchin, a seventy-three-year-old Democrat in his third term, to say that he could weigh anchor and escape anytime; for friends in politics, it provides an offshore venue for the kind of casual evening that Manchin considers vital to politics.

On this occasion, Manchin and his wife, Gayle, were joined by Senators Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine—who, along with Manchin, occupy a small island of centrists in a fiercely divided Congress. Collins told me recently, “It’s increasingly a lonely place to be.” Hours earlier, in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, Collins had been one of seven Republicans who joined Democrats in pronouncing him guilty. But the final tally was 57-43, ten votes short of conviction. To those who had hoped that the defiling of the Capitol and the assault on police would at last break Trump’s grip on his party, the result was dismal.

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