If
Joe Biden
and
Donald Trump
weren’t running, the race to the 2024 presidential election would be the wide-open, competitive contest many Americans say they want and, on the available evidence, aren’t going to get.
Joe Biden looks to have decided he didn’t spend a half century trenching through politics to become a lame duck two years after replacing his I-get-around Corvette with Air Force One. Even most Democrats don’t want him to run, but Mr. Biden has frozen his party’s field—for now.
Mr. Trump as a former president is merely shrinking the GOP field, with former Maryland Gov.
Larry Hogan
saying Sunday he’ll stay out rather than contribute to a Republican “multicar pileup.”
New Hampshire’s high-energy Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said over the weekend he might run, but would get out fast if it was clear in the early primaries he had no chance, rather than let Mr. Trump win as in 2016 against a large, divided field.
What’s halfway between a frozen and fluid field? Slush. Which brings us to Sen. Joe Manchin, politics’ man of mystery. Asked last weekend if he’d run for president, the poker-faced West Virginia Democrat said, “I’m not taking anything off the table, and I’m not putting anything on the table.”
When Sen. Manchin was driving fellow Democrats batty by holding the Biden spending agenda hostage for most of 2021-22 and refusing to weaken the filibuster, this column suggested more than a year ago that the senator might be positioning himself as a sensible moderate for a 2024 presidential run.
That lane looks closed now. A Democratic Party apparatus that months ago seemed willing to throw Mr. Biden over the side is now united behind a second run. Besides, most would argue, Sen. Manchin is his party’s leading pariah.
There’s a fix for that: The weekend before his presidential teaser, Mr. Manchin refused to tell a Fox News interviewer whether he still considered himself a Democrat. “I identify as an American,” he said.
The question for the moment is: How many voters feel they’re in the same place Mr. Manchin claims to be these days—their party affiliation weakening as concern for America rises?
Data from Gallup suggest that about 44% of voters describe themselves as independent. The issue of how left or right “leaners” vote is a fraught subject, but obviously a significant number of party-affiliated Americans aren’t happy with the state of our politics. Notwithstanding Mr. Trump’s win in the CPAC straw poll last weekend, the whispered reality is many Republicans would consider an “alternative.”
My year-ago hunch that Mr. Manchin was thinking about a presidential run had two premises. The first was that after months of opposition, Mr. Manchin had turned himself into the third best-known public figure in America—after Messrs. Biden and Trump. Mr. Manchin worked hard to get—and the media gave him—priceless name recognition.
Premise two was the assumption that Mr. Biden, for reasons of age and decline, was unlikely to seek a second term. That looks wrong. But because he can’t dump
Kamala Harris,
Biden-Harris looks like a weak ticket, vulnerable to defections.
It may be “early,” but it’s not too soon to put the short money on 2024 being a rerun of Biden vs. Trump. In which case, I think an independent Manchin candidacy will be on the table.
The rule of thumb—a good one running from
Teddy Roosevelt
to H. Ross Perot—is that independents can’t win, or merely can cause someone else to lose. Mr. Manchin’s bet would have to be that he could assemble an unprecedented number of votes from disaffected independents, nonprogressive Democrats and Trump-fatigued Republicans.
As to financing a campaign, this country’s economy is producing billionaires by the bushel, many unhappy with the two traditional parties. The money would be there.
Winning the Electoral College vote for an independent is all but impossible, but Mr. Manchin obviously likes being a spoiler. A strong independent performance might deprive either Messrs. Biden or Trump of an Electoral College majority. Fasten your seat belts. By the way, Gov. Hogan said Tuesday he wouldn’t rule out an independent run. It’s in the air.
Joe Manchin is 75. It’s not an issue. He looks 65 and has natural charisma. Critics will say the more apt description is he’s an instinctive chameleon. He’s also facing the unattractive prospect of running for re-election next year in a West Virginia whose Democratic Party is moving left while the state’s general electorate has gone right. His opposition to the Biden agenda, presumably an act of fiscal rectitude, ultimately achieved little of legislative substance, not that anyone outside Washington noticed.
I’d see a Manchin independent candidacy running on the same narrative as Florida’s Ron DeSantis: Washington is broken. That’s Mr. Trump’s message, too, though alas, the messenger is also broken.
Mr. Manchin’s reasonable assumption may be that the two parties themselves are so broken that they’ll default to nominating Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In which case, he—or someone—is going to get in.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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