Manchin Rails Against Partisan Politics, Spurring Speculation Over Independent Bid

The senior U.S. senator of West Virginia, Joe Manchin, is the last holdout red state Democratic senator to announce his intention to run for re-election, and there are signs it may be because he has his eye on the White House.An interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” from Sunday has spurred a new round of speculation over his possible presidential aspirations.Mr. Manchin told NBC that he was aiming to unite a divided country, though he stopped short of promising to run for either the Senate or the presidency.“When you’re asking me what I’m going to do and what my political ambitions would be, it’s to make the country work together and be a United States and not the divided states,” he said.When asked whether he would run for president, Mr. Manchin refused to give a straight answer on the subject.“I would never intend to be a spoiler of anything. I would like to basically be a promoter of united government,” he said. “A united government that has basically provided the greatest opportunities in the world.”The interview came after months of Mr. Manchin railing against President Biden and his administration over the implementation of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.Mr. Manchin was critical in the passage of the bill, with his vote being the final one needed to pass it in the Senate last summer, after months of negotiations.In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, the senator accused the administration of implementing the bill that the White House would have liked to pass last summer instead of the one that actually passed.“Instead of implementing the law as intended, his administration subverts it for ideological ends,” Mr. Manchin wrote for the Journal.He’s also taken a position between mainstream Democrats and the Republicans on the budget, and has publicly suggested that both Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible for the ongoing failure to pass a national budget.“First of all, the president has a budget that’s supposed to be out in February — it was not. Next of all, Congress, the Senate’s supposed to have a budget by April Fools Day,” Mr. Manchin told CNN. “That didn’t happen, and by the 15th the House and the Senate’s supposed to have a reconciliation of a bill.”While what Mr. Manchin said is true, his focus on the Democratically controlled White House and Senate is telling.Although Mr. Biden’s budget was late, coming on March 9, House Republicans don’t appear to have any plan nearly a month later, and reporting from Politico suggests that Americans shouldn’t expect one any time soon.All this jostling from Mr. Manchin, alongside his long-standing relationship with the centrist No Labels group, an anti-partisan fundraising organization, has led some to suggest that he might be running for president, even though he has promised not to play the spoiler.“I would never intend to be a spoiler of anything,” Mr. Manchin told NBC.Although No Labels has claimed that a nonpartisan ticket would sweep the nation, winning around 60 percent of the popular vote and picking up states like Texas, New York, and almost every state in between, those projections change when a name gets attached to the No Labels ticket — especially when that name is “Manchin.”When Mr. Manchin is included in presidential polling, his numbers suggest that he might not even be an effective spoiler. A Harvard Harris poll from late March, for one, found he would only carry some 2 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary.Although there hasn’t been polling on a general election contest that includes Mr. Manchin, it’s not clear who exactly his constituency would be. His approval rating in his home state has been hovering around 40 percent since he signed on to the Inflation Reduction Act.A political scientist at John Jay College, Brian Arbour, told the Sun that the problem for Mr. Manchin is that there’s just not much of a constituency for him among voters.“As such it’s hard to me to think that Manchin will get a high vote share in a general election,” Mr. Arbour said. “Voters are too loyal to their party and think of politics in a binary.”“In general, most voters are pretty loyal to their party these days — some out of genuine commitment to the party, some because polarization has made it easier to identify which party is closer to them, and some because the opposition seems further away,” Mr. Arbour added.While the possibility of a presidential bid from Mr. Manchin is real, the other political explanation for Mr. Manchin’s distancing himself from Democratic leadership is that he’s trying to regain the approval rating highs he saw last spring.According to a Morning Consult poll from April 2022, Mr. Manchin enjoyed an approval rating of 57 percent — including 69 percent of Republicans — in his home state of West Virginia, which was up 17 points from the beginning of 2021.The same pollster found in October 2022 that Mr. Manchin’s approval rating had plummeted to 42 percent. The main difference between April and October was that Mr. Manchin cut a deal to support Mr. Biden’s signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Manchin Rails Against Partisan Politics, Spurring Speculation Over Independent Bid

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