Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced last week that he won’t be seeking re-election in 2024. Usually, the retirement of a coal-loving, conservative Democratic lawmaker deep in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry would be exciting news. But in this particular case, it marks a triple blow to Democrats.
First, Manchin represents an exceptional strategic advantage for Democrats that will be difficult for the party to regain once he leaves the Senate. Manchin is an anachronism: a senate Democrat from a blood-red southern state. Since the 1970s, both parties have grown more polarized and geographically segregated. Manchin’s hold on his seat since winning a 2010 special election is a relic from a bygone political era. While his conservatism played a chief role in curtailing some of the most important legislation of President Joe Biden’s time in office, he votes with the president the vast majority of the time and generally caucuses with his party in good faith. When he leaves the Senate, he will almost certainly be replaced by a conservative Republican in a state where Donald Trump trounced Hillary Clinton and Biden by around 40 points.
Manchin’s departure creates enormous complications for the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority.
Manchin’s departure creates enormous complications for the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority. During Biden’s tenure, Manchin’s vote has been indispensable to securing the president’s legacy-defining policies, from a massive aid package to help mitigate a Covid-racked economy to a historic climate bill to spending on major health care subsidies and IRS reform. With one fewer vote in the Senate, Biden’s list of accomplishments would run a lot shorter than it does now.
Republicans already have a structural advantage in the Senate, where relatively low-population red states are overrepresented. And in 2024, more than twice as many Democrats as Republicans will be up for re-election. That includes all three Democratic-held seats in states that voted for Trump in 2020: Manchin, Montana’s Jon Tester and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown.
The second blow to Democrats is that it appears that Manchin is actively considering a third-party presidential bid. In his video announcing he won’t run for re-election, Manchin said, “What I will be doing is traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.” If he were to make a run, it would likely be in association with the centrist political organization No Labels, which has pitched the idea of a “unity ticket” to combat party polarization. The organization’s appetite for a potential spoiler run is unclear, but it appears possible: In July, the group’s co-chair said he saw a No Labels run as an “insurance policy” against a Biden-Trump rematch.
As I’ve written before, the claim that No Labels — an organization that lacks substantial national infrastructure, any obvious constituency or ideological coherence — is a bizarre, misguided attempt at bringing America together. Unfortunately Manchin appears to view it as a possible vehicle for realizing a savior complex: “I’m here trying to basically save the nation,” he said at a No Labels event in New Hampshire this summer. If Manchin really did pursue such a run, and was able to get on ballots in enough states, he could siphon off potential Democratic voters. While the odds are remote that it would be a substantial number of people, it’s hard to see it as something Democrats would be happy about, given the tight margins that presidential races are always decided by, and especially given the abundance of other independent and third party bids that could eat away at Democratic votes.
The third blow is mostly an emotional one — a pang of longing for another world in which Manchin hadn’t torpedoed a host of critical policies because he may have known he was exiting mainstream politics and could’ve used the opportunity to do greater good. Alongside Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz,, Manchin is the main reason that Biden’s policy record, while thicker than it would have been without Manchin’s vote, is ultimately much thinner than it could’ve otherwise been. Most notably, Manchin’s pushback against Biden’s Build Back Better bill (which eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act) excised, among many other things, universal pre-K funding, the child tax credit and huge swaths of more robust climate policies that would’ve secured a better future for our children and our planet. Manchin and Sinema also thwarted even incremental attempts at filibuster reform that could’ve secured essential voting rights for vulnerable Americans.
When Manchin pushed back against these policies, one read of his behavior was that he felt he had to establish himself as a maverick lawmaker and be seen as reining in major spending in order to secure his re-election prospects in a conservative state. To the extent that that motivated his pushback against Biden, it now seems like it was all for naught.
Ultimately, there’s no way to know how much Manchin was motivated by attention-seeking ego or an idiosyncratic kind of conservatism all along during those negotiations. But if he really does pursue a quixotic third-party presidential bid that could undermine his own party, the theories that it was ego all along might be the strongest.