CV NEWS FEED // Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, stated that he is “absolutely” thinking about leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an Independent.
The 75-year-old senator is up for re-election next year. He made his remarks during a Thursday interview with Hoppy Kercheval, a longtime radio host in Manchin’s home state. “I would think very seriously about that,” Manchin said referring to the prospect of becoming an Independent:
I’ve been thinking about that for quite some time. I haven’t made any decisions whatsoever on any of my political direction.
I want to make sure my voice is truly an independent voice, when I’m speaking, I’m speaking about the good the Republicans do and the good the Democrats continue to do.
“The bottom line is—will the middle speak up?” he said. “Does the middle have a voice?”
In the interview, the senator made it clear that he was disillusioned with increased partisanship, expressing his belief that “both sides” have “gone off the Richter Scale.”
“For me, I have to have peace of mind, basically,” he continued:
The brand has become so bad. The “D” brand and “R” brand. In West Virginia, the “D” brand because it’s nationally bad. It’s not the Democrats in West Virginia. It’s the Democrats in Washington or the Washington policies of the Democrats. You’ve heard me say a million times that I’m not a Washington Democrat.
The day after the interview, Kercheval commented on the senator’s re-election chances.
“Manchin firmly believes he can win re-election if he decides to run again, even if Republican Governor Jim Justice is the nominee,” he said. “A poll in June had Justice leading Manchin 54 percent to 32 percent. Manchin is concerned about running in his home state with that “D” beside his name.”
As Kercheval pointed out, West Virginia is “deeply red.” In the past six years, Manchin has been the only Democrat to win statewide office there – and he only won his 2018 re-election bid by three points in what was nationally a stellar year for the party.
The last time West Virginia backed a Democrat in a presidential election was in the 1996 re-election of Bill Clinton. Since then, the coal-rich state has trended precipitously to the right, especially as Democrats have increasingly backed “green” policies.
In 2000, West Virginia was a swing state, with George W. Bush only carrying it by six points. In both 2004 and 2008, it voted Republican by 13 points. The GOP doubled that margin in 2012 as the state went for Mitt Romney by 27 points.
However, with Manchin’s narrow 2018 win being the only exception, West Virginia has become even more out of reach for the Democrats during the Trump years. The former president carried it by nearly 42 points in 2016 – his second-best state in the country – with Hillary Clinton only receiving just over a quarter of the vote. In 2020, Trump carried the state by a slightly smaller yet similarly unusual margin of 39 points.
Kercheval predicted that “any Democrat” in West Virginia
will have an even tougher time if Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket. It is also questionable whether running as an independent would give him any real advantage in West Virginia. It might actually work against him.
Yes, one in four voters in the state is an independent—no party affiliation—so those individuals would conceivably be open to a candidate who, like them, rejects a party label. The other three out of four belong to one of the two major parties. Manchin would have to peel off votes from Republicans and Democrats to have a chance.
As of August 11, Manchin has not made up his mind whether or not to run for what would be his third full Senate term in 2024. In March, he stated that he would make his “political decision in December, whatever it may be.”
He has also weighed the possibility of running for president as an Independent or under the “No Labels” banner, backed by the centrist organization of the same name. Either way, if he decides to seek the White House, Manchin would most likely be running against Biden, the odds-on favorite to be his current party’s nominee.
“I’ve never been in any race I’ve ever spoiled,” Manchin said at a No Labels event last month. “I’ve been in races to win. And if I get in a race, I’m going to win.”
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If Manchin were to go through with leaving the Democratic Party, he would become the fourth Independent in the U.S. Senate. The other three – Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, Angus King, I-ME, and Kyrsten Sinema, I-AZ – all currently caucus with the Democrats.
Sanders, a national political figure, is a socialist who is well-known to be to the left of the Democratic Party. The lower-profile King votes with President Biden over 98.5% of the time.
This leaves Sinema, who, like Manchin, is a centrist, as arguably the only true Independent senator. First elected as a Democrat in 2018, Sinema made waves last December when she left the Democratic Party, saying that she “never really fit into a box of any political party.”
As of August 11, Sinema has also not publicly announced whether or not she is running for re-election, although she filed paperwork to do so late last year.
Manchin is almost universally hated by the far-left, who see him as being the lone Senate Democrat holding up many of Biden’s more radical agenda items such as “climate action.” This is especially the case now that Sinema, who was similarly attacked by the far-left, is an Independent.
One “green” leftist activist even went as far as to call the West Virginia senator “a modern-day villain.”
A self-professed Catholic, Manchin is currently the only person in the one-and-a-half-year history of CatholicVote’s Heroes and Zeroes to be named both a “hero” and a “zero.” On top of this, he received this distinction within a three-month span last year as a “hero” of February 2022 and a “zero” of May 2022.
The senator holds a “C” rating from the Catholic Accountability Project, indicating his truly mixed voting record.
While he voted for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, the right for churches to stay open during COVID restrictions, no men in women’s sports, and penalties for late-term abortions, he also voted for the confirmation of Secretary Xavier Becerra, the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act” (widely called the “Disrespect for Marriage Act” by its critics), and to revive the pro-abortion “Equal Rights Amendment.”
