The red-state Senate Democrat goes extinct

After 18 years in the Senate, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana) had no idea where he was headed.

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked his aide as he wended his way through the bowels of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. “You’re f---ing bass-ackwards!”

Since losing reelection last month, Tester, 68, has tried to get his bearings. He’s wrestled with what’s happened to his party. He’s been feted with speeches on the Senate floor. But now, on perhaps his last workweek at the office, he had to do one thing before leaving Congress for good: make his way to the Capitol’s Social Security benefits office.

“I’m not going to be pulling in a salary,” he said. “I gotta start collecting.”

With November’s election results, a certain species of senator is going extinct right now: the red-state Democrat. Those last remaining lions are all on their way out: Tester, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, 72, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin III, 77 (who became an independent earlier this year but had spent the previous 40ish years as a Democrat).

They span the political spectrum in Democratic politics - Brown on the left, Tester in the center and Manchin on the party’s right flank - but all of them managed to hang on to their seats, for decades, in territory increasingly hostile to Democrats - in no small part because of their personal traits, which to many people exude a sense of the rural and/or working class.

Brown talks with a growl, as if he gargles gravel, and speaks fluent workingman; he’s comfortable in union halls even though he’s a product of the Yale student union (Brown lost his bid for a fourth term by 3.6 percentage points).

Manchin is known for donning Hawaiian shirts and stocking his houseboat with cheap beer for late-night cruises on the Potomac with his colleagues - all while having a swing-vote power to help float or sink the Democratic agenda (Manchin declined to run for reelection, perhaps sensing how endangered his species had become).

And Tester. Tester’s got a flattop haircut that looks like it was trimmed by a combine, and three fewer fingers (sliced off by a meat grinder) than his colleagues. He drinks his beer red (with Clamato juice), urinates in the fields of his organic pea farm (“Can the senator’s penis please be off the record,” an aide once begged a reporter) and carries suitcases full of beef when he travels to Washington.

Tester had already given his farewell speech on the Senate floor, which toured through watersheds and farm subsidies and built toward a plea for campaign finance reform. Now, getting his retirement benefits meant that he had to travel into unfamiliar territory: the House of Representatives, home to the Social Security office.

“What are you doing over here on the dark side?” a congresswoman asked Tester as he ambled on to a packed elevator.

“I gotta go sign up for Medicare,” he said.

“I thought on the Senate side everyone’s already done that!” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) said with a laugh, making a joke about the, uh, seniority of the Senate.

Right now on Capitol Hill there’s a college move-out day vibe. In the Hart Senate Office Building, Tester’s third-floor office was empty by Tuesday morning. Down the hall this week, Manchin’s staff was pushing dollies laden with boxes and carrying bubble-wrapped frames.

“Clock needs to stay,” said one aide.

“What about the bird seal?” asked another.

A reporter was offered a bottle of water not just as a matter of courtesy, but as a tactic of efficiency. “One less thing to move: a case of water,” an aide said.

On Tuesday, Brown was preparing to give his farewell speech, which would be full of mentions of picket lines and pensions, “true populism” and the “dignity of work.” In his fifth-floor lair in Hart, staff gathered before making the pilgrimage together to watch their departing boss deliver his final remarks.

“You don’t want to be caught crying,” said one of Brown’s staffers, warning her colleagues of the reporters who’d be watching them on the floor. “We need to be proud and joyous.” (That staffer, it should be noted, would cry more than anyone else once Brown was delivering his speech.)

Brown wears a canary-in-a-cage brooch instead of the traditional Senate pin - an homage to coal miners and their fight for safe working conditions.

“Senator, are you going to run again in 2026?” a reporter asked him as he scurried to Democratic senators’ weekly luncheon near the chamber.

“I don’t know,” Brown said curtly. “Are you going to run for something in 2026?”

“I might!” the reporter replied.

“Well, I might, too,” Brown said before darting off.

Tester said that Brown is “very good” but that running again would “be crazy.” Democrats, he believes, have made it hard for people like him and Brown to win.

At a going-away reception last week, someone told Tester that a high-ranking Republican senator believed Tester would’ve won if he were a Republican. “Is that really what matters?” Tester mused Tuesday, disgruntled, adding: “Are we more concerned with whether there is a D or an R in front of your name than being an American? Because if that’s the case I’m f---ing glad to be leaving.”

Manchin was still taking meetings in his office even as his belongings were being packed. He bounded to the Senate floor on Wednesday afternoon in a cobalt suit, purple tie and dressy blue sneakers.

“It’s chaotic,” Manchin said of his final days. He’d recently learned that his energy-permitting reform bill wouldn’t be coming to a floor vote after all. “You got one person out of four who can make a decision to make or break something, or kill it. The system doesn’t work. … It’s been frustrating for 14 years.”

During those 14 years, and especially the past eight, Manchin has been one Democrat who could greenlight or derail the party’s agenda. Manchin helped Democrats confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, threw a lifeline to the Affordable Care Act and voted to convict Trump in both impeachments.

On the other hand, he voted to confirm Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, doomed social-safety-net proposals in the “Build Back Better” bill and, when Democrats had a chance to reform the filibuster, he tanked it (along with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, another outgoing Democrat turned independent). As his final term waned, Manchin blocked one of Biden’s nominees to the National Labor Relations Board.

“At times I felt like, uh - I felt like the whole Senate was united in being upset with me,” Manchin told colleagues during his final floor speech earlier this month, as knowing chuckles began to ripple through the chamber. “So maybe we did - maybe we were able to bring you together. I don’t know. I tried.”

Now, Manchin is really on his own. There will be some consulting work, he hopes. He’ll be free, for the first time in decades, to make his own schedule - a prospect equal parts thrilling and daunting.

“No one’s calling me and telling me: ‘Go here, do this, you got to be here a certain time, here’s your speech, boom, boom, boom,’” Manchin said. “So now, to be free and untethered, it’s going to be unbelievable. I don’t know how to feel. It’s been since 1982 since that’s happened.”

For Tester, the path to becoming just another citizen was starting to feel like a labyrinth. He’d made his way over to the House side and still hadn’t found the Social Security offices. He was in the basement of the Capitol now, no longer fully trusting his aide, and seeking help from a couple of workers leaning against the wall.

“How do we get to the Longworth building, fellas?” Tester asked.

“Follow the road,” one said, pointing down the hallway.

“It’s not yellow brick!” Tester said, a skip in his step.

Tester certainly won’t miss having to wake up at 2:30 in the morning for his weekly commute from Montana. Now he’ll have more time for farming, more time to figure out what’s next for himself. But he’s worried about how Democrats have lost the kinds of voters who used to elect him.

“They might continue down the same old road,” he said of his party. “They might not deal with the big issues but deal with the fringe issues. And if they do, they’re f---ed.”

And Tester worries that the state of the Senate will be “diminished” by the loss of colleagues like Brown and Manchin. They were senators who helped tip the upper chamber into Democratic hands. This meant signature bills could pass: the covid relief bill that distributed billions of dollars to struggling Americans, and Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

Tester walked through a long, bending corridor. Everywhere he went, he was greeted by well-wishers.

“This our floor?” Tester asked after getting into yet another elevator. “No? What the hell? … We’re going to Longworth! We’re already in Longworth? Go to hell.”

Finally he stumbled on the Social Security office.

“I’m Jon Tester,” he announced after opening the glass doors, sounding like he was approving a campaign ad. “And I’m here to see … somebody.”

Tester filled out his paperwork and was asked to swear that the information he provided was correct. His Senate career: beginning and ending with an oath.

“I swear it,” he said. “I’m honest Jon.”

He walked out of the office, into the marble hallway and turned, once again, to his aide.

“Okay,” he said. “Do you know where we’re going now?”