Joe Manchin Won’t Seek Re-Election
A likely lost seat for Democrats in 2024.
WaPo (“Senate Democrat Joe Manchin says he will not seek reelection“):
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) announced Thursday he would not seek reelection in 2024, setting back Democrats’ plans to hold onto their Senate majority in 2024 and raising their fears that he could get involved in the presidential race as a third-party candidate.
“After months of deliberation and long conversations with my family, I believe in my heart of hearts that I have accomplished what I set out to do for West Virginia,” Manchin said in a video posted to X. “I have made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for reelection to the United States Senate.”
Manchin, 76, had defied political gravity by holding onto his seat in a deeply red state but would have faced long odds against either Gov. Jim Justice or Rep. Alex Mooney (W.Va.), who are running in the GOP primary next year. The veteran politician had run the coal country state as governor, but West Virginia’s rightward turn in recent years had left him the only Democrat in statewide office.
Faced with what he knew would probably be the race of his life, Manchin was weighing retiring from politics altogether or running for president as a third-party candidate backed by the centrist group No Labels.
Manchin’s announcement video suggests he has not chosen the retirement path just yet, as he said he planned to travel the country to gauge “if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.”
Democrats fear such a bid would hurt President Biden’s chances of reelection at a time when polls show him losing swing states to former president Donald Trump, and when several other candidates are also launching third-party runs.
Manchin spokeswoman Sam Runyon declined to comment on whether he planned to pursue a presidential run, and a No Labels spokeswoman said the group won’t decide until early 2024 about whether to nominate a ticket and who will be on it.
“The Senate will lose a great leader when he leaves, but we commend Senator Manchin for stepping up to lead a long overdue national conversation about solving America’s biggest challenges, including inflation, an insecure border, out-of-control debt and growing threats from abroad,” said No Labels spokeswoman Maryanne Martini.
Manchin has long been a paradox: the only Democrat who could plausibly win a Senate seat from West Virginia and the Senator who is arguably the biggest thorn in the side of the caucus leadership. Still, whether his stances were based on ideology, grandstanding, donor interest, or some combination of those, the fact remained that he was a vote for a Democratic Majority Leader and committee chairs and he is almost certainly going to be replaced by a Republican.
We’ll see if he in fact joins a No Labels ticket. If he does, I’m not so sure that he mostly takes votes away from President Biden. There are a lot of voters looking for an alternative to a re-run of 2020 and it’s quite possible that there are more Trump-leaners in that camp than Biden-leaners.
I do, however, find it amusing that, if he heads said ticket, the alternative to the (then) 81-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Trump will be another 77-year-old.
To the surprise of no one.
The Dems’ path to keeping the Senate in 2024 is tough, but doable. (It will depend most of all on whether Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown can do what no Dem so far has been able to do, which is win a Senate race in a state that simultaneously backs Trump in the presidential election.) And his retirement doesn’t really change the equation, as he was likely to lose if he had run for another term.
I do think a Democratic Senate majority that includes Manchin is better than no majority, and I’m highly aware of the fact that his narrow 2018 win ended up mattering quite a bit to Biden’s ability to implement his agenda and confirm judges, including Ketanji Brown Jackson. That said, the prospect that the Dems just might be able to secure a majority without Manchin or Sinema–which I do genuinely believe is not a pipe dream–is a pleasant thought.
I guess Dems had a marginally better chance of keeping the seat with Manchin, but it was very unlikely to begin with. More interesting to me is his legacy. I remember reading an analysis from a long time West Virginia political analyst who dived into his legislative history throughout his entire history (he was Governor before he was Senator). Basically it was all slogan based legislation, poorly researched and written and had no long term affect on anything. In at least one case and maybe more, when the tide turned on something he had drafted, championed and got passed, during his next election he campaigned to overturn it, ret-conning it, acting as if he had nothing to do with it in the first place.
He was a corrupt, petty and venal man, who hid his money grabs by pretending to be conservative. He claimed he represented the common folk of West Virgina while living in his yacht in DC, hosting legendary “parties” for lobbyists from the industries he was supposed to regulate. Not coincidentally, his personal wealth came from ownership in those industries, and his “principled stands” always ended when he got something that benefited his personal finances.
It’s a sad loss if it costs the Dems the Senate, but on a moral and ethical level, good riddance to bad rubbish.
@MarkedMan: While I’m not trying to sound like I’m defending Manchin, any analysis has to deal with the very rapid shift in the state’s partisan lean. It’s the mirror image of Vermont in a lot of ways. Even before he was governor, Manchin began his political career as a state legislator in the ’80s, at a time when even Dukakis was carrying the state. The state’s politics changed around Manchin, sort of like the little house in that old children’s book, and a lot of his behavior can be explained as an attempt to adapt to that reality. We can condemn him, but we can’t dispute the fact that he survived longer than any other Democrat in a statewide office in the state. It doesn’t make him noble or moral, but it does make him rational.
@Kylopod: I’m critiquing him less for his politics and more for his mediocrity and apparent corruption. I’m sure he had many wealthy good ol’ boy donors slapping him on the back, telling him he was a hero for taking the Senate to the mat over this or that proposal that financially affected both them and Manchin, and how he was a Champion of Conservative Principles!, by god, and should get a medal. Whether or not he believed such tripe or just pretended to believe it, the effect was the same.
@Kylopod:
That. The seat was lost last week. Nothing actually changed with his announcement yesterday.
File this under just asking questions. Yesterday the Feds announced several arrests, breaking up a suburban DC and Boston escort service, detailing in the announcement that the customer list included politicians, bureaucrats and military officers. Later that day Manchin announces that he’s not running. Coincidence? Inquiring minds want to know.
Now, I get that she’s fluffing him to become the “party’s” (????) head grifter. Even so, considering the list of “America’s biggest challenges,” how is No Labels any different from bog-standard conservative Republicans (whose wives dress in good Republican cloth [even if bog-standard] coats)?
Who do you want?
A variable mercurial lover that might or might not want what you want? Who shapeshifts constantly according to the daily whim? Or a straight up policy opponent who opposes your policy straight up?
There is a lot of clout that comes with holding the Senate majority, but Manchin was always an outlier. A semi, purported D who very often used his oddity D from a red state in a nearly 50-50 Senate to create multiple hostage situations.
Rs fucking loved him as a D. He created maximum damage, chaos, and messaging failures.
Face it. The Democrats should never have held that seat. It was a weird local anomaly that he was elected at all let alone re-elected. West Virginia is a red state. Manchin was always an anomaly. It’s a Red seat and Manchin just spoofed the system.
If you judge him by party principles and shiboleths he’s barely a Democrat. He is clearly acting against Ds best interest often and has a habit of abusing his absurd status and uses that odd uniqueness to extort ransom.
What are his principles and morals? No clue.
When Liz Cheney went rogue and clearly disobeyed party prohibitions it was for a moral principle. She paid the price. Probably gladly. She was plenty pissed off at what her colleagues were doing.
Manchin was never really a D, more a vaguely centrist R policy wise in D clothing.
Losing the Senate seat will suck, but you never really had it, and dude used it like a hostage taker. It wasn’t really yours, you just lucked into it by accident for a few years. WV ain’t gonna elect a D Senator to replace him.
Flip another seat. Manchin was a shitty ally. Good riddance!
@Sleeping Dog: Conspiracy theory? I have a couple of connected WV friends who’ve been telling me for a couple of weeks that Manchin was stepping down (so I’m calling BS). I hope he eventually tells his story on how he (as WV Gov) got the Westboro Baptist Church bigots not to show up at the Sago Mine disaster funerals (sh0rt version, you look like venison to the local hunters on the ridges).
Meanwhile in WA, New Democrat (Centrist) Derek Kilmer won’t be running for reelection (so 12 years in Congress, replacing the Congressman from Boeing, Norm Dicks, 36 years) for family reasons that I actually believe (His kids are in high school in WA, didn’t move to DC). I expect he’ll run for Governor (I”d vote for him again, I support Centrists) and now one of the 2 Dem candidates for Gov (Hillary Franz) just withdrew from the Gov race to run for Derek’s Congressional seat and has butt-loads of endorsements in one day = this was planned. The other Dem in the Gov race is the AG that isn’t exactly beloved by his party. I’m just reading tea leaves, YMMV BTW, in WA-6, if the Reps go with a non-Trumper, they could win but this is late in the game in what would have been an unwinnable seat so only crazies need apply.
@de stijl:
I strongly disagree. WV is a very red state now, but it used to be one of the bluest states in the country. Even Dukakis won the state. And then Bill Clinton won it by wide margins twice. It only started shifting to the right with the turnover of the century, but even then it remained pretty strongly Democratic at the state level until 2014. It had two Democratic Senators, a Democratic governor, and a Democratic legislature. Even as Obama lost the state in 2008, Senator Jay Rockefeller was easily reelected; that seat only flipped after he retired. And Manchin was the sitting governor when he ran for Robert Byrd’s seat, following Byrd’s death.
There was nothing fluky or anomalous about Manchin winning the seat when he did. He was a popular Democratic governor in a traditionally Democratic state that was in the process of transitioning, but hadn’t completed the process yet.