Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema increasingly gaining support from GOP donors: report

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are increasingly gaining the financial support of wealthy Republican donors, Wall Street, and big corporations.

A recent report written by The New York Times' Kenneth Vogel and Kate Kelly reveals the two centrist Democrats "have won growing financial support from conservative-leaning donors and business executives in a striking display of how party affiliation can prove secondary to special interests and ideological motivations when the stakes are high enough."

Per the report, Sinema's increasing support comes as a result of her "opposition to raising personal and corporate income tax rates." Conservative donors have gravitated to Manchin due to his continued efforts to push Democratic lawmakers to scale back the budget for President Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda and place limitations on components of the president's social welfare priorities.

The increasing Republican financial support for Manchin and Sinema has gained attention because most of the donors have very little history with the two lawmakers.

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The report also highlighted another reason why the donations are significant. "The financial support is also notable for how closely tied it has been to their power over a single piece of legislation, the fate of which continues to rest largely with the two senators because their party cannot afford to lose either of their votes in the evenly divided Senate," the Times reports.

"Their influence has been profound," Vogel and Kelly write. "The domestic policy bill, which would expand the social safety net and efforts to fight climate change, started out at $3.5 trillion and has been shrunk — mainly at the insistence of Mr. Manchin — to around $2 trillion; it could get smaller as the Senate takes up the version passed on Friday by the House. New spending measures were originally to have been paid for mostly through tax-rate increases on the wealthy and corporations — a component of the plan that had to be substantially rewritten because of Ms. Sinema’s opposition."