Israeli aircraft strike Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza Strip

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli aircraft conducted strikes early Tuesday on Islamic Jihad targets in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said, and residents reported blasts in the Palestinian enclave.

Witnesses said an explosion hit the top floor of an apartment building in Gaza City and a house in the southern city of Rafah. Palestinian media said several people were injured. There was no immediate confirmation from health authorities.

The airstrikes come as tension boils between Israel and militants in the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by the militant Hamas group.

In anticipation of Palestinian rocket attacks in response to the airstrikes, the Israeli military issued instructions advising residents of communities within 25 miles (40 kilometers) of Gaza to stay close to designated bomb shelters.

Last week, Gaza militants fired several salvos of rockets toward southern Israel, and Israeli military responded with airstrikes following the death of a hunger-striking senior member of the Islamic Jihad in Israeli custody.

The airstrikes are similar to ones in 2022 in which Israel bombed places housing commanders of Islamic Jihad group, setting off a three-day blitz that saw the Iranian-backed group loosing its two top commanders and other dozens of militants.

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Opinion | We Need a Manhattan Project for AI Safety

Worries about artificial intelligence have suddenly seized Washington: The White House just hauled in a roster of tech CEO’s to press them on the safety of their new AI platforms, and Congress is scrambling for ways to regulate a possibly disruptive and risky new technology.

There are a lot of immediate concerns about the latest generation of AI tools — they could accelerate misinformation, job disruption and hidden unfairness. But one concern hovers over the rest, both for its scale and the difficulty of fixing it: the idea that a super-intelligent machine might quickly start working against its human creators.

It sounds fanciful, but many experts on global risk believe that a powerful, uncontrolled AI is the single most likely way humanity could wipe itself out.

At the heart of the threat is what’s called the “alignment problem” — the idea that a powerful computer brain might no longer be aligned with the best interests of human beings. Unlike fairness, or job loss, there aren’t obvious policy solutions to alignment. It’s a highly technical problem that some experts fear may never be solvable. But the government does have a role to play in confronting massive, uncertain problems like this. In fact, it may be the most important role it can play on AI: to fund a research project on the scale it deserves.

There’s a successful precedent for this: The Manhattan Project was one of the most ambitious technological undertakings of the 20th century. At its peak, 129,000 people worked on the project at sites across the United States and Canada. They were trying to solve a problem that was critical to national security, and which nobody was sure could be solved: how to harness nuclear power to build a weapon.

Some eight decades later, the need has arisen for a government research project that matches the original Manhattan Project’s scale and urgency. In some ways the goal is exactly the opposite of the first Manhattan Project, which opened the door to previously unimaginable destruction. This time, the goal must be to prevent unimaginable destruction, as well as merely difficult-to-anticipate destruction.

The threat is real

Don’t just take it from me. Expert opinion only differs over whether the risks from AI are unprecedentedly large or literally existential.

Even the scientists who set the groundwork for today’s AI models are sounding the alarm. Most recently, the “Godfather of AI” himself, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his post at Google to call attention to the risks AI poses to humanity.

That may sound like science fiction, but it’s a reality that is rushing toward us faster than almost anyone anticipated. Today, progress in AI is measured in days and weeks, not months and years.

As little as two years ago, the forecasting platform Metaculus put the likely arrival of “weak” artificial general intelligence — a unified system that can compete with the typical college-educated human on most tasks — sometime around the year 2040.

Now forecasters anticipate AGI will arrive in 2026. “Strong” AGIs with robotic capabilities that match or surpass most humans are forecasted to emerge just five years later. With the ability to automate AI research itself, the next milestone would be a superintelligence with unfathomable power.

Don’t count on the normal channels of government to save us from that.

Policymakers cannot afford a drawn-out interagency process or notice and comment period to prepare for what’s coming. On the contrary, making the most of AI’s tremendous upside while heading off catastrophe will require our government to stop taking a backseat role and act with a nimbleness not seen in generations. Hence the need for a new Manhattan Project.

The research agenda is clear

“A Manhattan Project for X” is one of those clichés of American politics that seldom merits the hype. AI is the rare exception. Ensuring AGI develops safely and for the betterment of humanity will require public investment into focused research, high levels of public and private coordination and a leader with the tenacity of General Leslie Groves — the project’s infamous overseer, whose aggressive, top-down leadership style mirrored that of a modern tech CEO.

I’m not the only person to suggest it: AI thinker Gary Marcus and the legendary computer scientist Judea Pearl recently endorsed the idea as well, at least informally. But what exactly would that look like in practice?

Fortunately, we already know quite a bit about the problem and can sketch out the tools we need to tackle it.

One issue is that large neural networks like GPT-4 — the “generative AIs” that are causing the most concern right now — are mostly a black box, with reasoning processes we can’t yet fully understand or control. But with the right setup, researchers can in principle run experiments that uncover particular circuits hidden within the billions of connections. This is known as “mechanistic interpretability” research, and it's the closest thing we have to neuroscience for artificial brains.

Unfortunately, the field is still young, and far behind in its understanding of how current models do what they do. The ability to run experiments on large, unrestricted models is mostly reserved for researchers within the major AI companies. The dearth of opportunities in mechanistic interpretability and alignment research is a classic public goods problem. Training large AI models costs millions of dollars in cloud computing services, especially if one iterates through different configurations. The private AI labs are thus hesitant to burn capital on training models with no commercial purpose. Government-funded data centers, in contrast, would be under no obligation to return value to shareholders, and could provide free computing resources to thousands of potential researchers with ideas to contribute.

The government could also ensure research proceeds in relative safety — and provide a central connection for experts to share their knowledge.

With all that in mind, a Manhattan Project for AI safety should have at least 5 core functions:

1. It would serve a coordination role, pulling together the leadership of the top AI companies — OpenAI and its chief competitors, Anthropic and Google DeepMind — to disclose their plans in confidence, develop shared safety protocols and forestall the present arms-race dynamic.

2. It would draw on their talent and expertise to accelerate the construction of government-owned data centers managed under the highest security, including an "air gap," a deliberate disconnection from outside networks, ensuring that future, more powerful AIs are unable to escape onto the open internet. Such facilities would likely be overseen by the Department of Energy’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, given its existing mission to accelerate the demonstration of trustworthy AI.

3. It would compel the participating companies to collaborate on safety and alignment research, and require models that pose safety risks to be trained and extensively tested in secure facilities.

4. It would provide public testbeds for academic researchers and other external scientists to study the innards of large models like GPT-4, greatly building on existing initiatives like the National AI Research Resource and helping to grow the nascent field of AI interpretability.

5. And it would provide a cloud platform for training advanced AI models for within-government needs, ensuring the privacy of sensitive government data and serving as a hedge against runaway corporate power.

The only way out is through

The alternative to a massive public effort like this — attempting to kick the can on the AI problem — won’t cut it.

The only other serious proposal right now is a “pause” on new AI development, and even many tech skeptics see that as unrealistic. It may even be counterproductive. Our understanding of how powerful AI systems could go rogue is immature at best, but stands to improve greatly through continued testing, especially of larger models. Air-gapped data centers will thus be essential for experimenting with AI failure modes in a secured setting. This includes pushing models to their limits to explore potentially dangerous emergent behaviors, such as deceptiveness or power-seeking.

The Manhattan Project analogy is not perfect, but it helps to draw a contrast with those who argue that AI safety requires pausing research into more powerful models altogether. The project didn’t seek to decelerate the construction of atomic weaponry, but to master it.

Even if AGIs end up being farther off than most experts expect, a Manhattan Project for AI safety is unlikely to go to waste. Indeed, many less-than-existential AI risks are already upon us, crying out for aggressive research into mitigation and adaptation strategies. So what are we waiting for?

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Mexican president calls Florida’s new anti-immigration bill 'immoral'

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador slammed Florida’s new anti-immigration bill on Monday, calling it “immoral” and “politicking” after lawmakers passed a bill last week that gives Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis $12 million for migrant transports.

“Why does [DeSantis] have to take advantage of people’s pain, of migrants’ pain, of people’s need for political gain,” López Obrador said at a press conference. "This is immoral. This is politicking."

The measure will guarantee $12 million for a controversial program DeSantis has used to fly migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

“Now I found out that the Florida governor — imagine, Florida, which is full of migrants — is taking repressive, inhumane measures against migrants in Florida because he wants to be a candidate,” López Obrador said. “Can’t he not make another proposal to convince people?”

DeSantis is expected to announce a run for president in the coming weeks.

The legislation lawmakers passed last week would require medium-sized and large employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check the status of new employees and mandates hospitals to ask patients about their legal status.

The bill, SB 1718, will also allow authorities to charge someone with human trafficking if they knowingly transport an undocumented migrant across state lines. It would also prohibit an undocumented immigrant from driving a car even if they have a driver’s license from another state.

López Obrador said that he has a call planned tomorrow with President Joe Biden to discuss migration and the fentanyl crisis.

“We will talk about our cooperation, which is very good, very, very good, and we will keep it that way," López Obrador said.

López Obrador’s comments come as GOP governors continue to send migrants to Democratic-led states. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday that Texas would bus “thousands more” migrants in the coming days. On April 30, Mayor Lori Lightfoot urged Abbott to stop shipping busloads of migrants to Chicago, saying the city does not have the resources to absorb more. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has also been critical of Biden for “failing” the city on immigration.

On Christmas Eve, three buses of migrant families arrived from Texas near the home of Vice President Kamala Harris in record-setting cold.

“Then, in an inhumane, vulgar and vile way, they started to take migrants while it was cold to New York, to Washington, to the vice president’s house," López Obrador said. “The Republicans did this … something that degrades them from a moral, human point of view.”

Carmen Paun contributed to this report. 

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Exclusive: White House's new knock on House GOP debt plan — the fentanyl crisis

We got a first look at the latest memo from President Joe Biden's team ahead of tomorrow's big bipartisan meeting on the borrowing limit.

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Why McConnell and McCarthy locked arms on the debt crisis

When Joe Biden called Mitch McConnell to talk about the debt limit, a funny thing happened: The Senate GOP leader, after two years of breaks with Kevin McCarthy, fell into full alignment with the speaker.

McConnell confirmed in an interview that he was clear with Biden, his old negotiating partner, during their call last week: You've got to cut a deal with McCarthy, not me.

After working with Biden in the past to avert fiscal calamity, the Senate minority leader is steadfast that this time it’s McCarthy and Biden’s job to avoid default. Ahead of Tuesday’s debt meeting with the president and bipartisan Hill leadership, McConnell describes himself as essentially powerless to do anything other than support his fellow Republican leader given the House's GOP majority.

McConnell’s move helps McCarthy’s negotiating position — and perhaps just as importantly, it boosts his own standing within a Senate Republican conference that has shifted rightward, a lurch that sparked the first-ever rebellion against his leadership last fall.

McConnell said Biden isn't the first president he's pushed to work with a House controlled by the opposing party.

“This is the very same advice I gave Donald Trump after the Democrats took the House. It wasn’t the first thing on their mind to negotiate with Nancy Pelosi. But they did,” McConnell said. “My advice in private is the same as I’ve been saying publicly … quit wasting time here. And in the end, the deal will be made between McCarthy and Biden.”

Five months ago, it was impossible to imagine the reserved McConnell on the same page with the chummy McCarthy. During Biden's first two years in office, they split on everything from gun safety to infrastructure to the billions of dollars in Ukraine aid tucked into a bipartisan spending deal. McCarthy quickly moved to repair his relationship with Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, while McConnell never spoke to Trump again.

Their rifts created deep tension between House and Senate Republicans, who at times seemed at polar ends of the GOP as McCarthy positioned himself to win the speakership and McConnell steered the party away from Trump. Democrats privately believe McConnell will jump in to help save the day on the fast-approaching debt deadline, but conservatives see him as joined with McCarthy “until hell freezes,” as Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) put it.

So when lawmakers get to the White House on Tuesday, expect McCarthy to do most of the talking for Republicans.

Asked if she anticipated a quiet McConnell during their slated meeting, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) replied: “Yes. He’s like: ‘I’m here to support McCarthy.’”

As McConnell and McCarthy set up Tuesday's meeting during separate phone calls with Biden, the two Republicans spoke several times to coordinate their message, according to a person with direct knowledge of their talks.

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, replied to questions about McConnell's call with Biden by stating the administration does not comment on private discussions with congressional leaders. He added, however, that “avoiding default is a critical priority for our economy — one that presidents from both parties have acknowledged is non-negotiable.”

Despite McConnell's and McCarthy's clear personality differences, Republicans argue that the two are more alike than not: Both are political animals focused on their legacies who maintain a close read on their party and members. McConnell drolly surmised that McCarthy “has an interesting set of players” to deal with in the House, from the conservative Freedom Caucus to moderates.

McCarthy's closest allies see his relationship with the Senate leader maturing. Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) described “a better line of communication now. And that has made a big difference.”

“Where the McConnell and McCarthy teams have come to an understanding is first with communication — better communication — and a mutual recognition of their different challenges,” McHenry said.

And Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), who once interned for the Senate Republican leader, recalls a longtime McConnell-ism: that being a Senate leader is “kinda like being the undertaker at a cemetery.”

“You're over everyone, but nobody's listening,” Barr recounted, describing McConnell as “empathetic to Speaker McCarthy's job, which is also about the difficulty of bringing together a lot of independent-minded people.”

The duo is converging on the crucial issue of Ukraine aid, too, following a rocky stretch. After McCarthy rebuked a Russian reporter over the war during an overseas trip, McConnell even took to the Senate floor to praise the Californian.

Scott Jennings, a Kentucky-based GOP strategist and longtime McConnell confidante, said that gesture was a sign of “respect and support.”

McConnell has navigated past fiscal fights where the political odds looked stacked against him, but Republicans who are close with both leaders say that mutual destruction would result if he steps out of line with McCarthy now. In fact, McCarthy could lose his gavel, causing chaos in the House, if McConnell were to negotiate a side deal with Democrats.

“Whether it's political ideology or pure pragmatism, [Senate leaders] recognize that a deal that's not good with House conservatives is not making it through,” said first-term conservative Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).

McCarthy’s House already passed a package of blunt spending cuts coupled with a one-year debt ceiling increase that Republicans are using as leverage against Democrats who vow they’ll only accept a straightforward hike. Tuesday's meeting with Biden, McCarthy, McConnell, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will be this spring's first tangible move to break the deadlock.

“If there is a path forward, it’s going to require serious and swift cooperation with Sens. Schumer and McConnell, Leader Jeffries and Speaker McCarthy. And that's partly why I think there's so much anxiety about the possibility of default,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a close Biden ally.

Republicans are almost universally insistent that, in light of the House GOP's passage of its plan, the next step is Biden’s to take. They're feeling especially confident after McCarthy proved he could corral his party, with only a handful of votes to spare, in favor of raising a borrowing limit that many promised never to touch.

McCarthy may feel a squeeze if the Democratic-controlled Senate sends back its own legislation, but that would require nine or more GOP votes to break a filibuster.

Despite the growing McConnell-McCarthy warmth, House conservatives still harbor strong suspicion of the Senate GOP leader due to his opposition to Trump and support for multiple bipartisan bills last Congress. That group of McConnell skeptics includes some of the same members who initially blocked McCarthy's path to the speakership.

“Nothing McConnell does surprises me; his actions are against everything [and] everyone who promotes conservatism,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) wrote in a text message.

Others in the bloc of 20 who voted against McCarthy during the speaker race, such as Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), bashed McConnell in the wake of the Senate's approval of a $1.7 trillion spending bill in December. In light of that display, some Senate Republicans also believe it's McCarthy turn to take arrows for cutting a tough deal, according to one person familiar with the Kentucky Republican’s thinking.

McConnell was blunt in seeing no upside to working with Biden on a side agreement, even after steering his party out of similar debt ceiling impasses just two years ago.

Any such accord with the president, McConnell said in the interview, “would produce nothing. Because the House of Representatives is not going to pass a bipartisan debt ceiling deal negotiated, presumably, with Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer.”

So does McConnell have any advice for McCarthy on future negotiation with Biden, whom McConnell served with for decades?

“[McCarthy] doesn’t need any advice from me about how to handle himself. I just think that the solution here is so obvious,” McConnell said. “This is going to be decided when the speaker and the president reach an agreement.”

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Wall Street primary wide open as DeSantis stumbles

Wall Street is firmly in the Never Trump camp. Finding a Republican who can make “never” happen is another question.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had been seen as the top pick to lock down the support of financial titans who have already pumped millions into his state campaigns.

But as he stumbles through gaffes over everything from his personal demeanor and stance on Ukraine to his snacking habits, Wall Street donors are keeping the door open to his competitors, according to more than a dozen bankers, attorneys and political consultants interviewed for this story.

“People will change horses,” said Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist for both former Bush presidents. “You may get really excited about somebody and then all of a sudden realize, 'Eh, not really my cup of tea.'"

Where Wall Street puts its money matters because financial industry executives are among the biggest donors in presidential elections. And while bankers and asset managers generally favor lower taxes and lighter-touch regulation, they also value stability and experience — and they spread their money around to candidates of both parties, meaning they're very much in play in each cycle.

On paper, that should give DeSantis an advantage. People close to Wall Street donors said his national profile and powerhouse fundraising operation that has included support from hedge fund titans like Ken Griffin and Jeff Yass had positioned him as most able to survive a primary with former President Donald Trump.

DeSantis' gubernatorial reelection campaign is still loaded with cash, giving him big advantages over possible competitors. But many now say he no longer seems so formidable — at least on Wall Street.

His escalation of a feud with the Walt Disney Co. over its opposition to what critics called the “don’t say gay” law has made for a rocky rollout to an expected presidential campaign announcement in the coming weeks. On April 26, the company announced it was suing DeSantis, saying he violated its First Amendment rights — which will force him to do battle with one of his state’s largest employers in federal court.

It was “‘wait and see,’ and this is why,” said an adviser to one top GOP donor in New York, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to avoid alienating candidates. “We’re not the only ones who are happy with our decision to wait and see.”

With Trump surging in the polls following his indictment on criminal charges stemming from alleged hush money payments, one executive at a New York bank said confidence in DeSantis’s ability to win is flagging.

“DeSantis is certainly a better option than Trump at this point,” the executive said. “But he's a really weak option.”

The executive said many are growing resigned to the possibility of a general election rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.

“What we probably wind up with is a choice between a guy who is very old and wants to raise our taxes and reregulate everything, and a guy who could be running from prison,” the executive said.

In the meantime, any hesitation about DeSantis’s viability could be good news for Republicans who have tried to carve out space as business-friendly alternatives to Trump. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott — another South Carolina Republican who has launched an exploratory committee — have started lining their war chests with checks from major investors, according to campaign filings released in April.

During the first quarter, Haley raised about $8.3 million across her campaign, joint fundraising committee and leadership PAC. Scott, the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, raised $1.6 million and had $21.9 million on hand through his Senate committee, according to POLITICO’s analysis of his FEC filings. Those funds can easily be transferred to a presidential committee should he formally announce.

Scott is a fixture in New York, turning up for meetings at various big banks, and is beginning to draw backers at firms like Goldman Sachs. Bankers say they appreciate both his personal narrative — rising from humble beginnings — and his positive message about the power of American capitalism.

Still, Scott and Haley’s fundraising totals remain modest compared to those of DeSantis-aligned groups — one state-level committee, Friends of Ron DeSantis, has more than $85 million on hand.

For many Republicans on Wall Street, “there’s a lot of concern about whether Trump will consolidate support in the polls,” said Ken Spain, a partner at Narrative Strategies who advises investment firms. “Then the concern becomes: Does that freeze money in the investor class? Do people sit on the sidelines if they think the chance of defeating Trump in a primary is diminishing?”

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who leads the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills this week that the Trump campaign's tactics over the next two months will be "well-organized, calculated, surgical."

"This reminds me a lot of '16 where everybody's trying to figure out alternatives to Trump," he said.

Those dynamics won’t make things any easier for DeSantis, who’s been catching flak over everything from the Disney fracas — a “self-inflicted wound,” one financial industry power broker said — to his arms-length relationship with key donors and GOP allies in Florida.

“I call my donors. I call my supporters. And that's been an issue that people have complained about with him,” said Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican who has flirted with a 2024 bid.

But Scott, Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence and other potential GOP nominees face their own challenges. While DeSantis has shown he can win big in a swing state, other nominees have won in Republican strongholds. Many also lack national name recognition that would put them within striking distance of Trump or DeSantis.

“Scott is pretty fantastic, and if he can perform the way I think he can he has a real chance,” said one senior banker who is trying to organize support for him. “But it’s obviously a big hill to climb.”

DeSantis allies are taking comfort in the difficulties other candidates could have in breaking through. While there’s “some hesitancy from the Wall Street Journal class,” the Florida governor’s resources should be enough to sustain any surge from non-Trump competitors, said Jason Thomas, a Republican strategist who runs a pro-DeSantis Super PAC.

Even though DeSantis has shown a willingness to wage public battles against big businesses — hardly typical of what Thomas labeled a Country Club Republican platform — Thomas said he expects financial services donors to “eventually come home when DeSantis recaptures his first-place position in the nomination process or is the nominee.”

The first executive at the large New York bank said Wall Street would love a candidate like former House Speaker Paul Ryan “or a younger Mitt Romney.”

But they acknowledged that Trump would likely obliterate any candidate from the increasingly small centrist segment of the GOP.

“We all saw what happened to Jeb Bush, who everybody up here loved,” the executive said of Wall Street donors who flocked to the former Florida governor’s 2016 campaign. “He got crushed and crushed quickly, and that would just happen again.”

DeSantis could face another problem even if he does win substantial financial industry backing: Executives say they worry that raising money or donating to his campaign would give Trump the chance to brandish him as a Wall Street lackey.

“We know everyone hates us and that nobody running for president wants to be seen as the ‘Wall Street candidate,’” the first executive said. “So you’ll probably see a lot of people just sitting this one out.”

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Republicans want Manchin to bow out, fearful that he may have one more trick up his sleeve

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. — Republicans' best option for unseating Sen. Joe Manchin: Pray that he retires first.

The longtime West Virginia Democrat might be the most endangered member of his party heading into 2024. But Republicans still see the contest against him as treacherous. Manchin is a West Virginia institution who has repeatedly defied the odds in a deep-red state.

A GOP group tied to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell launched a $2 million ad campaign bashing Manchin a year and a half before the election. National Republican leaders, who have no interest in leaving any room for error in their efforts to retake the Senate, have recruited popular Gov. Jim Justice to run for Manchin’s seat. And Justice, who has shared a political network with the senator, has said it’s unlikely Manchin will run for reelection now that he’s in the race. National GOP leaders hope so — or are privately wishing his flirtations with a centrist presidential run turn into a full-fledged campaign.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.) said she doesn’t know whether her fellow home-state senator will run for reelection and hasn’t asked him about it. But a presidential bid? “He might — he’s talking about it,” she said.

There’s no sugar-coating the dire position in which Manchin finds himself. After Democrats dominated West Virginia for decades, the state has gone full-blown MAGA in recent years. Former President Donald Trump won it by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020, and there are only 14 Democrats left in West Virginia’s 134-member state legislature. Manchin’s approval rating has plummeted, with 55 percent of voters giving him a thumbs down, according to a recent Morning Consult poll.

But interviews with 18 elected officials, strategists and political observers in West Virginia and Washington, D.C. reveal that Manchin isn’t quite being left for dead yet. Even Justice’s former pollster said it would be unwise to count Manchin out.

“There is a reason that Joe Manchin is basically the last standing Democrat in a state that has had a red tsunami since 2014,” said Mark Blankenship, a West Virginia-based GOP pollster who worked for Justice’s 2020 gubernatorial campaign. “You can’t say that it’s impossible for him to win because he’s won so much.”

Manchin’s GOP colleagues agreed with the sentiment: “You can't take Joe for granted. He's a formidable politician,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who appeared as a featured speaker at Justice’s campaign kickoff last month.

The early investment from McConnell’s allies at the group One Nation could save Republicans money next year — if it nudges Manchin toward the exit. Otherwise, the GOP will have to spend millions convincing West Virginia voters to part ways with a man who has not lost an election since the 1990s. Without Manchin on the ballot, many operatives see the state as an automatic flip, and Republicans can redirect their money toward other crucial battleground states.

“It would be nice if we didn't have to,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) when asked if his party would need to spend money if Manchin retires. “We'll see how it all plays out.”

Manchin first joined the West Virginia state legislature in 1982 at the age of 35. He served in both chambers before departing to run an unsuccessful primary campaign for governor in 1996. It was the only race he ever lost. He ended up supporting the Republican nominee over the woman who beat him for the Democratic nomination.

Four years later he became West Virginia’s Secretary of State and won the governorship in 2004. In 2010, he made the jump to the Senate, campaigning in a special election seat left open by Democrat Robert Byrd’s death.

Democrats’ best hope of keeping Manchin’s seat in 2024 involves him seeking reelection and a brutally messy Republican primary that leaves the eventual nominee bruised and broke.

Justice, while wealthy and well-liked, does not have the GOP field to himself. Also in the race is Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), a conservative hardliner who trounced a fellow member in a Republican primary for a House seat in 2022. He is planning on running to Justice’s right with the help of $10 million from the anti-tax Club for Growth super PAC.

Democrats and Republicans alike said Manchin has been able to hold onto elected office in the past in part due to his skills as a retail politician, a key advantage in a state of only 1.7 million people.

“He is the best face-to-face politician I've interacted with outside of Bill Clinton,” said Patrick Hickey, a political scientist who previously worked at West Virginia University. “He has that Clinton-esque ability to make everybody feel like he's your friend and he's listening to you and he's concerned about you.”

In 2012, Hickey said he invited Manchin’s GOP opponent, John Raese, to class. “Within a week,” he said, Manchin came into his class to glad-hand students.

Manchin, a moderate, has benefited from distancing himself from national Democratic leaders for years. During his first Senate campaign, he fired at Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill in an ad. His vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 was credited with helping save him in that year’s Senate race. But Manchin’s favorability rating took a nosedive last year after he voted for — and helped write — President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. That’s left many of the few remaining Democrats in West Virginia feeling pessimistic about Manchin’s chances for holding on, regardless of his history.

“I don’t think he can pull it out,” said Deirdre Purdy, chair of the Calhoun County Democratic Party. “My county has so few Democrats in it, I can't even get a full committee together.”

Manchin is now threatening to vote to repeal Biden’s signature climate legislation with Republicans, arguing that Biden has extended electric vehicle tax credits beyond the law’s specifications.

Given the state’s deep-MAGA hue, some in the GOP think it doesn’t even matter whether Justice or Mooney wins the nomination because either will defeat Manchin. “This state’s now solidly Republican,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Manchin has given few clues about whether he will run for reelection except to say that he won’t make a decision until the end of the year. Amid that vacuum of information, political insiders have desperately tried to read the tea leaves.

When a political operative who has served as an adviser to both Manchin and Justice attended Justice’s campaign launch, it set off speculation among Republicans that Manchin may not run. Larry Puccio, Manchin’s former chief-of-staff and longtime friend, would only go to the event, the thinking went, if he had gotten a signal from the senator that he’s bowing out. A GOP strategist close to Justice said Puccio will not have an official role on Justice’s Senate team, but the governor will “talk to him about the race and campaign.”

Some Democrats cautioned against reading into it, however. According to a person close to Manchin, Puccio “will support Manchin for any office he seeks.”

Puccio did not respond to a request for comment.

Jonathan Kott, a former senior adviser to Manchin, said he believes Manchin is truly undecided on another Senate run. In the 2018 election, Manchin waited until January — days before the filing deadline — to tell his colleagues that he was seeking reelection.

“This is just who he is,” he said. “He just doesn't focus on the campaign till he has to. He’s busy being a senator for West Virginia and legislating. He'll sit down with his family, I would guess sometime in like December, and that’s when they’ll make a decision. I’m pretty sure that’s what he did last time.”

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