Manchin is right that it’s brutally hard for him to survive while participating in passing the Democratic agenda, which is unpopular in his deeply red state.

But it’s a fiction that Manchin’s role as a decisive vote means he’s smack in the ideological middle of the country. In fact, this fiction makes the problem worse. It creates the illusion that he represents the true ideological center of public opinion — that the public is evenly divided on these issues, and that the deadlock in the Senate merely reflects that.

That illusion, in turn, obscures the degree to which deep structural imbalances, as opposed to the true state of public opinion at any given time, loom as the main obstacles to action. And it obscures the real reasons Manchin wields such vast power over the process — which, we’re now seeing, threatens consequences that could prove worse than anyone can guess at.

-Greg Sargent from the Washington Post