CV NEWS FEED // During a casual Sunday interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, retiring Sen. Joe Manchin, I-WV, blasted the Democratic Party – which the 77-year-old Manchin had belonged to for his entire adult life up until he left it earlier this year.
The Democratic “brand got so bad,” Manchin said. “It’s toxic.”
“The Democratic Party, the Washington Democrats, have tried to mainstream the extreme,” the senator told CNN’s chief congressional correspondent.
As both men sipped beers at a bar counter, Raju asked the outgoing senator to describe the factors that led him “to divorce himself from the Democratic Party” in May.
“Here’s what I told them,” Manchin replied. “I said you ought to figure out how you lost somebody like me.”
“I was born as a Democrat because of my grandfather’s love of FDR,” added Manchin, who is set to leave office and be succeeded by a Republican in a week and a half.
“I was a very strong Democrat because of my family’s love of John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” he continued. “I came through the whole iteration and I was a Democrat in West Virginia, and it has always been a 75, 80 percent plurality of … registered Democrats.”
“But there was a split,” Manchin pointed out. “I was never on the liberal side of it. I was never in the establishment side.”
Widely described as a political moderate and a centrist, Manchin is a Catholic with a mixed voting record on life issues and the LGBTQ movement.
Raju asked Manchin if the Democrats underwent a “shift on the social issues.”
“Yeah,” Machin said. “The Democrat I grew up being, they wanted to make sure that people had an opportunity for a good job.”
The party of decades past “never infringed over, ‘You can’t live your life that way, you can’t say this, you can’t do this,’” Manchin stressed. “It has changed tremendously.”
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The modern-day Democratic Party “have basically expanded upon thinking, ‘Well, we wanted to protect you there but we’re going to tell you how you should live your life that far on,” the senator said.
He emphasized that the “progressive left” was “always a minority.”
Also during the interview, Raju told Manchin that “progressive” Rep. Greg Casar, D-TX, recently insinuated the Democrats would have won the 2024 presidential election if only they had run farther to the left.
To this, Manchin responded: “They’ve got to be nuts. For someone to say that, they’ve got to be completely insane.”
Manchin explained that last month, the American people decisively chose President-elect Donald Trump over failed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
With Trump, “you know exactly what you are getting, he hasn’t made any bones about it,” the ex-Democrat elaborated, acknowledging that many Democrats claim Trump’s policy agenda is “too far-right.”
“If that’s the case, then why did [voters] go too far-right, when Kamala was trying to come back to the middle a little bit?” Manchin said, referring to Harris’ sudden purported pivot to the political center after she controversially became the Democratic nominee this summer. “And they’re saying if Kamala has been who she always has been – pretty far to the left – it would have been better for her. That’s crazy.”
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On the same day Manchin’s comments aired on CNN, one high-profile Democratic senator cautioned that fellow members of his party need to drastically change their approach to dealing with the president-elect.
“I’m not rooting against” Trump, Sen. John Fetterman, D-PA, told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “If you’re rooting against the president, you are rooting against the nation. And, and I’m not ever going to be where I want a president to fail.”
Fetterman told Karl that he has “been warning” Democrats “to chill out” over Trump’s sweeping election to a second non-consecutive term.
During the same sit-down with Karl, Fetterman complimented Trump’s “political talent” and criticized the decision of many Democrats – including Harris herself – to imply that Trump was a fascist during the 2024 campaign.
“I happen to love people that are going to vote for Trump, and they are not fascist,” the senator said. “And also fascism, that’s not a word that regular people use.”
>> CATHOLICVOTE ANALYSIS: HARRIS’ YOUNG MALE PROBLEM <<
“I think people are going to decide who is the candidate that’s going to protect and project, you know, my version of the American way of life, and that’s what happened,” Fetterman pointed out.
