Why on Earth Would Joe Manchin Run for President?

Take me awaaay from hooome, country roads! Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

In the course of just a week, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has managed to make news twice in connection with a possible 2024 independent bid for the presidency. First, Puck published some leaked communications from the bowels of the No Labels organization, which is seeking 50-state ballot access for a hypothetical bipartisan presidential ticket in 2024 aimed at offering a centrist alternative to the allegedly broken and extremist major parties. Among the material was a No Labels phone conversation in which Manchin (a longtime intimate of the group) sounded very much like a potential candidate for the White House.

Then Manchin turned up in Iowa, where presidential politics are as popular as corndogs. Axios interpreted the trip as a definite sign the West Virginian is having White House dreams:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) may not have announced that he’s running as a third-party candidate for president. But he’s acting like it.

Driving the news: Manchin took time from his busy Senate schedule to tell a gathering of Iowa business and community leaders Wednesday in D.C. that he’s “fiscally responsible and socially compassionate” — another hint that he’s considering a potential third-party presidential bid.

Back in the Senate, he released a statement vowing to oppose all President Biden’s EPA nominees over the administration’s “radical climate agenda.”

It’s unclear to me why Iowa, which is now your basic red state, would be a rich venue for a proto-independent presidential candidate, other than the state’s hyper-political atmosphere. But let’s say Manchin is considering a run on a No Labels ticket (the only one available in 2024, as a practical matter). What would he be trying to accomplish? Let’s look at some possible motivations for a Manchin 2024 campaign, based on past independent/third-party presidential bids.

It’s a serious bid to win the presidency.

Supposedly No Labels won’t run a ticket unless there’s a good chance of victory. But in the past, independent candidates (notably John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992) had a moment of strength in the polls that convinced them erroneously that they had a chance to win. Both were running second for a hot minute but faded in the home stretch. So would any independent candidate in an election where Trump and Biden will fiercely hold onto Republican and Democratic partisans with the stakes getting higher every day.

There’s zero precedent for a successful centrist third-party (or independent) candidacy winning anything other than random down-ballot contests (the biggest probably being Minnesota’s governorship in 1998). And I can’t imagine a scenario where Manchin could win 270 electoral votes. He almost certainly would lose to the Republican nominee in his home state. So, nope, this isn’t a legitimate reason for a Manchin presidential race.

It’s a ploy to deadlock the Electoral College and then cut deals.

There are some precedents for candidates with regional strength to try to win enough states to prevent the major-party presidential from winning a majority, thus throwing the election into the U.S. House of Representatives where every state has one vote. The last viable effort like that was in 1968, when segregationist George Wallace hoped a close Humphrey-Nixon contest would wind up in the House where the South could extort a curtailment of civil-rights laws or enforcement. Wallace did win five states and 46 electoral votes, but Richard Nixon won 301 and put the election away.

Manchin has no discernible regional base and no state where he’s likely to pull off a rare victory (like Anderson and Perot, the best he might conceivably do is second place in a few states). So he would have no leverage unless it was based on a withdrawal and then an endorsement. That’s a lot of trouble to go through for a limited degree of influence, and the major-party candidates probably wouldn’t infuriate their supporters by going along in any case. So nah, that’s probably not what Joe Manchin has in mind.

It’s an effort to remake the Democratic Party.

Manchin is a lifelong Democrat, albeit one whose legislative raison d’être since he’s been in the Senate has been to gain influence by threatening a defection. He’s forever complaining about progressive factional influence over the Democratic Party. Might he try to run for president as an independent in order to arrest or reverse what he perceives as a malevolent leftward trend in his party? Arguably Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive candidacy in 1912 and Henry Wallace’s identically named effort in 1948 were intra-party revolts. But both men were also trying to build viable new parties with a coherent ideology, and Joe Manchin doesn’t have a coherent ideological bone in his body unless you consider him an ardent Fossil Fueler.

Besides, the only way Manchin as an independent candidate could influence the future of the Democratic Party would be to defeat it in 2024, which would not make him a welcome presence in party councils. If he really wants to influence Democrats, it would make more sense for him to run against Biden in the Democratic primaries. He wouldn’t win, but he’d probably do better than RFK Jr. or Marianne Williamson. In the end, it’s very hard to shape the future of a political party by leaving it, so that, too, is probably not what Machin has in mind.

It’s an effort to build an entirely new party.

Again, it’s hard to imagine what a Manchin-led party would stand for other than cutting deals with rival parties. But for 2024, that’s off the table anyway, since No Labels is vigorously refusing to build a party infrastructure, treating its putative effort as a one-off emergency bid to change both the major parties simultaneously.

It’s something better to do than being crushed in Senate race.

Best I can tell, this may be Joe Manchin’s true rationale for considering an independent presidential run. His current trajectory for 2024 is a crushing defeat for reelection — probably a humiliating loss to his old rival Jim Justice — in West Virginia, where he has become very unpopular and will be bucking a very likely Republican presidential landslide. Flirting with a presidential run is a more ego-flattering course of action. And if he achieves a credible threat of running and damaging Joe Biden, who knows, his fellow Democrats could reward him with an appointment to something after 2024 if he instead demurs.

And if all else fails, a proto-presidential candidacy wouldn’t be a bad advertisement for Joe Manchin’s availability for a cushy lobbying job or some other nice retirement sinecure. It all beats the hell out of getting defeated in a Senate race.