Manchin: Americans want a ‘reasonable, responsible middle’

By Shawna Mizelle and Aileen Graef, CNN

Sen. Joe Manchin declined to say Sunday whether he would run on a centrist presidential ticket but the moderate West Virginia Democrat said Americans were sick of the political division in the country.

“We cannot basically have a divided country, and we cannot withstand that,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” in an interview with Dana Bash. “There’s a movement going on that people want, to bring the extremes back to the sensible and reasonable, responsible middle.”

Manchin would not respond when asked by Bash if he would consider running for president on a ticket of the business-friendly centrist group No Labels, which is seeking to get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states.

Manchin, who holds a pivotal vote in the narrowly divided Senate, has refused to say whether he thinks President Joe Biden deserves a second term in office. He has also been critical of certain aspects of the president’s agenda, and last week he called on Biden to negotiate on the debt ceiling instead of pursuing “an ideological agenda.”

Manchin, who is up for reelection next year, told NBC News on Sunday that any decision about his political future would be made at the end of the year.

“My filing date is January 15 in 2024, and I will make my decision maybe a little bit before that, but not until the end of the year, I can assure you,” he said.

The Democrat would rank among the most vulnerable senators this cycle if he chooses to run for a third full term in deep-red West Virginia — a state former President Donald Trump won by nearly 40 points in 2020.

Asked about Trump’s recent indictment by a Manhattan grand jury, Manchin said that “no one is above the law” but also that “no one should be targeted by the law, especially through the political process.”

“So we’ll just wait and see next week. I hope they are very thorough in the job they do, and basically people should have faith in this judicial system of ours,” the senator told Bash.

Manchin said he did not believe the former president was being targeted but added, “You have to remove all doubt. You have to make sure — cross every ‘T,’ dot every ‘I’, as they say.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.