...
By David Faris
Associate Professor, Roosevelt University
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
On Monday night, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) hinted strongly at a presidential run at the launch of the centrist No Labels political organization in New Hampshire. No Labels has been actively recruiting a potential moderate to enter the 2024 presidential race and has drawn increasing criticism from those who believe such a plan would re-elect Trump. So, of course, No Labels has turned to Manchin, who takes enormous pleasure in serving as the Democratic Party's never-ending migraine.
Democrats have long feared a third-party challenge from someone like Manchin, and for good reason. The limited polling we have suggests that a No Labels ticket, while it would come in a distant third, would draw disproportionately from President Biden and likely throw the election to Trump, if he were to win the GOP nomination. The same is true for polling of a hypothetical three-way race that included former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney. But boy howdy, would that person be the center of attention for the next 17 months.
And no one in American politics is thirstier to be the lead in as many news stories as possible than Joe Manchin. After spending the first two years of Biden's first term as America's de facto president, Manchin's leverage has vanished since Republicans took the House. The Democratic legislative agenda is DOA unless the party can win another trifecta in 2024, which is tough for Manchin since his whole schtick is to strip as much substance out of his own party's legislation as possible and then bask in the glory of his role as kingmaker.
Read More
America Is Hungry for New and Better Political Options | Opinion5 min read
One Key Way to Stop Donald Trump From Being Our Next President | Opinion6 min read
Third-Party Fantasies Can’t Overcome Constitutional Realities | Opinion6 min read
...
Down in the polls in his own 2024 senate race to likely Republican nominee Jim Justice, Manchin has apparently concluded that a No Labels suicide run is his ticket back to the limelight. Manchin's remarks at St. Anselm College were absurd and self-aggrandizing, even by his lofty standards. "I'm not here running for president tonight," Manchin told the crowd. "I'm here trying to basically save the nation."
Save the nation from whom or what you might ask? According to Manchin, it's from the partisanship roiling Washington. "They've gone too far right and too far left," he said of Democrats and Republicans at the excruciatingly unwatchable event, which mostly featured Manchin and former Utah Gov. Jon Hunstman droning on and on about the usual centrist bugaboos like the national debt and the border crisis.
In addition to being duller than an actuarial table, the whole thing was completely incoherent. Manchin and Huntsman denied that they were a ticket, but Manchin also said "We're here to make sure that the American people have an option. And the option is, can you move the political parties off their respective sides? They've gone too far right and too far left. That can't be done unless they're threatened." Huh? No Labels co-chair, former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, said that if the candidates were Biden and Trump after Super Tuesday, No Labels would run a ticket.
The logic is impenetrable. Are they trying to force Biden to the right? Do they want Democrats to nominate someone else or do they want Biden to prove his moderation by, I don't know, sacrificing some trans kids on a mountain of West Virginia coal? Is there some kind of plan to influence the GOP primary electorate to move away from Trump? Do they really believe that Biden and Trump are equivalent dangers to the United States?
Not even Manchin could possibly believe that. Trump is a wretched, disgraced and dangerous man who will be facing untold dozens of indictments during the campaign, almost certainly including some for his role in trying to overthrow the American constitutional system of government after the 2020 election. Biden, on the other hand, has been a steady if unspectacular president who made unity the centerpiece of his campaign and has racked up an impressive string of bipartisan legislative victories.
It's hard to know with this crew where the grifting ends and the delusion begins. A few months ago, No Labels released a farcical electoral map showing how a moderate independent could actually win the Electoral College. Analysts scoffed at it, and with good reason. It was completely divorced from reality, grounded in zero polling data and ignored decades of history showing how third-party candidates fare in presidential elections.
No independent or third-party candidate has carried a single state in the Electoral College since George Wallace won parts of the Deep South in 1968. That includes Ross Perot in 1992, whose 18.6 percent of the popular vote translated to precisely zero electoral votes. Look, just because something has never happened before doesn't mean that it can't happen, but there's nothing in the polling data to suggest that this bland group of mostly over-the-hill white dudes and washed-up hangers-on is going to upend centuries of American political history.
No wonder many people think No Labels is an elaborate GOP ratf**king operation masquerading as an homage to bipartisanship. And it's no surprise that Manchin is either in on it or too dense to see through the hollow arguments being trotted out about his viability. Having cost the Democrats half their agenda when they had a governing trifecta, he is precisely the guy the far right could use to get their wrecking crew back into power. It would be a fitting coda to Manchin's career to contribute directly to a Trump restoration that would likely destroy American democracy as we know it.
There's definitely a label for that: Joe Manchin, useful idiot.
David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week*,* The Washington Post*,* The New Republic*,* Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines