Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia announced Thursday he will not run for re-election in 2024, threatening his party’s thin majority in the Senate while also potentially becoming a third-party spoiler in next year’s presidential election.
“After months of deliberation and long conversation with my family, I believe in my heart of hearts that I have accomplished what I set out to do for West Virginia. I have made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for re-election to the United States Senate,” Manchin announced in a video on X. https://twitter.com/Sen_JoeManchin/status/1722698734910210420
“But,” he continued, “what I will be doing is traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest to mobilize the middle and bring people together.”
Note that he does not have much of a youth advantage over either major party candidate. At 76, Machin is a year younger than Trump and three years younger than Biden.
Democratic counterpoint: After the announcement, “Democrats said they had hopes of expanding the map to Texas and Florida” to retain a Senate majority, The Washington Post reports, as West Virginia voters almost certainly will replace Manchin with a Republican. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rick Scott (R-FL) both are also up for re-election next year.
Who’s spoiling whom?: It’s too early to say whether Manchin might siphon more votes from President Biden or from presumed GOP nominee Donald J. Trump.
But wait, there’s more: Jill Stein, the physician and activist who first ran for president in 2012, then again in 2016 with the Green Party has announced another third-party run for next year (USA Today).
Stein’s ’16 vote totals in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were big enough to give Trump the Electoral College wins in the three states, and it seems clear she would likely grab votes from Biden in ’24. About the time of her ’16 run, Stein was connected to Russian dictator/President Vladimir Putin. According to Accidental Czar – The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin, a graphic bio by Andrew S. Weiss and Brian “Box” Brown, Stein “attended the 2015 RT (Russian Television) birthday gala dinner and sat at the same head table with Putin and Mike Flynn.”
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Axelrod Calls on Biden to Drop Campaign
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson spoke on national television to say he would not seek, nor would he accept, his Democratic Party’s nomination for president that November. It did not work out for the party, whose nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon. But the point is that based on that timeline, President Joe Biden has a bit more than four months to drop his re-election campaign.
Former Obama political strategist David Axelrod wants Biden to reconsider, now, whether to run for re-election. “What he needs to decide is whether that is wise,” Axelrod wrote on X (per Axios).
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