The most powerful man in Washington appeared at an event on Tuesday and proceeded to make an unexpected declaration: He wasn’t really sure what political party he belonged to.

       The half-joking admission came as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) was being interviewed at the Economic Club of Washington. After a discussion about the ongoing negotiations over a bill his party is hoping to pass, centered on expanding social programs and addressing climate change, he was asked about a Mother Jones report that he’d considered switching parties.

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       The senator shrugged.

       “What I’m telling you now is who I am. Do you think by having a D or an I or an R is going to change who I am? I don’t think the Rs would be any more happier with me than Ds are right now,” Manchin said. “Okay? I mean, that’s about as blunt as I can put it. So I don’t know where in the hell I belong.”

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       That’s an interesting thing for an elected official from a political party to say! It certainly isn’t what the Washington press corps likes to call a “full-throated denial.” More of a throat-clearing, if anything.

       It’s also an interesting thought experiment. If we were to assign Manchin a political party based on his political views and political allegiances, where would he land?

       Let’s start with the second question. There are a few ways to measure the political views of a legislator. One is using a metric called DW-NOMINATE, an assessment of how liberal or conservative a legislator’s voting record has been relative to other legislators. Another is looking at the number of proposed bills the legislator has co-signed with other members of the chamber, a value calculated by the data site GovTrack.

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       Since Manchin came to the Senate about 11 years ago, he’s co-sponsored more than 1,000 pieces of legislation. The colleague with whom he’s co-sponsored the most legislation is a Republican — but there’s a catch. It’s Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the other senator from his state.

       Overall, he’s co-sponsored legislation with Democratic senators nearly twice as often as he has with Republican ones. The Democrats with whom he’s sponsored the most legislation tend to be more moderate; the Republicans with whom who’s done so are much more moderate.

       So that suggests that Manchin fits in with his current party’s caucus better than the Republicans. But, of course, the reason the issue has arisen at the moment is that Manchin is pushing back on that caucus’s legislative proposals.

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       If we look at Manchin’s views on key components of those bills and compare them to public polling, the picture is murkier. We should be very clear up front that comparing a legislator’s position on policy proposals to broad poll questions is fraught. If Manchin thinks that the cost of a program to expand pre-K is too high (as he has indicated he does) does he align with the Democratic support for such a measure or the Republican opposition? For the purposes of our evaluation, we put him as “lean opposed,” since he would not back the measure as proposed.

       Using news reports about his positions, we tried to roughly assess Manchin’s position on other proposals that have been included in various iterations of the Democratic bills (using CBS News-YouGov polling) and on President Biden’s climate change proposals (using polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications). Then we overlaid actual support for the proposals by party. The results are below.

       The CBS-YouGov poll asked about the twin Democratic bills outright. Both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the original Biden bill with significant program expansions were popular among Democrats and unpopular among Republicans — but Manchin himself was split on his views. On specific parts of the discussion, Manchin at times aligns with the left and at times the right. At other times, he aligns with neither.

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       What stands out is Manchin’s position on climate issues. There, his positions are uniformly in alignment with Republican views. This is also where Manchin has perhaps had the most obvious effect on his party’s bills; significant efforts to address climate change have reportedly been gutted or overhauled at his request. We granted him a “lean oppose” on transitioning to clean energy largely because his excuse for more drastic efforts to move away from burning coal to generate electricity was that utilities were already headed in that direction.

       Coal is a key part of this, of course. While coal mining makes up only a small part of West Virginia’s economy, it has a strong cultural presence for which Manchin frequently advocates. That means that he takes positions against robust efforts on climate, frustrating and angering other Democrats.

       This is more important to the conversation than you might think. The Democratic left has moved climate change to the center of much of its efforts in the past few years, a shift that’s particularly pronounced among younger voters. Manchin’s position on coal would have evoked shrugs 20 years ago and annoyance only among a segment of the Democratic electorate in 2011. Now, though, he’s not only in conflict with the party on an issue that many Democrats see as existential, he’s also blocking efforts to address the problem.

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       There’s an aspect of Manchin’s response at the Economic Club that is informative about how we use party identification. It’s generally not the case that people choose a party based on a lengthy examination of policy issues. It’s often instead the case that people align with the sense of identity or culture that the party represents. This isn’t uniformly true; someone who’s vehemently opposed to abortion would probably not be a Democrat, and someone who demands action on climate change would probably not be a Republican. But there are a lot of policy positions for which people don’t have strong opinions. They often only form their views through the lens of partisanship.

       What Manchin’s saying is that it’s hard to figure out his party based on his specific set of positions. That’s often true! Note that none of the dots on the second graph above sit at 100 or at zero. There is dissent within each party on the importance of policy positions. The glue is often the party more than the shared set of positions.

       And that’s the answer to Manchin’s question. That he doesn’t readily identify as a Democrat and that he doesn’t align with the party on one of its members’ most urgent concerns, climate change, suggests that Manchin is not really a partisan Democrat at all.

       One of the senators with whom Manchin has sponsored the most legislation is Sen. Angus King (I-Maine). They seem to share a political identification as well.