Is Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., considering retirement from politics… or is he setting up another run in deep-red West Virginia?
Manchin had implied in 2018 that he wouldn’t run for re-election in 2024.
Now that he’s one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, D.C., the moderate Manchin is suddenly being coy about his future ambitions.
Politico reported:
Joe Manchin strongly signaled in 2018 that his brutal reelection campaign that year was his last. Now, as he marshals the entire Senate in his centrist direction, he’s not so sure he’ll call it quits.
The West Virginia Democrat is steadily padding his campaign coffers, raising $1.6 million in the first six months this year and sitting on nearly $4 million for a potential race that wouldn’t occur for three years. His colleagues say he’s not acting like a senator in his last term, despite his famous assertion during his last campaign that Washington “sucks.”
Manchin has won the national spotlight this year for pulling his party rightward by issuing demands on crucial issues, and plenty of centrists and liberals have taken notice.
He said that the Senate has recently “accomplished more than we have for the 10 years I’ve been here.”
“You never know. You don’t know,” Manchin said during an interview when asked about re-election. “There’s always a chance, absolutely,”
On the other side of the Democratic Party — in a procession of meetings with White House officials and congressional budget writers about the upcoming Democratic spending bills — far-left progressives have taken on Manchin’s style and insisted that the emerging measures be big and aggressive, while moderates want them to be far more modest.
“We’re all Joe Manchin right now,” said House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth of Kentucky.
The leverage every Democrat has flows from simple arithmetic. Expecting unanimous Republican opposition to much of Biden’s initiatives, they need total unity in the 50-50 Senate — plus Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote — and can lose only a very few House votes.
With trillions in spending at their disposal, Democratic leaders have plenty of options for designing programs that appeal to lawmakers’ hometown interests to win votes. More broadly, however, the intraparty fight pits two ideologies against each other — progressives’ eagerness to give out cash, and moderates seeking to do so but with fiscal constraints — and their differences are real.
For example, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., recently floated an enormous $6 trillion proposal for infrastructure, climate change, health care and other programs that many on the far-left love. It goes well beyond Biden’s vision of spending roughly $4 trillion on similar projects.
Manchin has said he wants to pare it back further — which may be his only chance if he does hope to be reelected. Manchin only won re-election in 2018 by three percentage points.
And in 2020, Democrats lost every single county in West Virginia. There are no Democrats in any elected offices in the entire state outside of Manchin.
The Associated Press contributed to this article