What a Manchin third-party bid in 2024 might mean

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) last week on Capitol Hill. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is apparently entertaining the idea of running as a third-party candidate for president in 2024:

He indicated last month that this was on the table, telling “Meet the Press” that he would announce his presidential plans shortly after the New Year and adding, “Can’t I be a moderate centrist, with whatever identification, or no identification?”
He has flirted with party-switching in recent years.
He has ties to No Labels, the well-funded centrist group seeking ballot access in all 50 states. On a call with the group last week, he sounded a lot like a candidate, according to Puck News.
And as Axios’s Hans Nichols wrote Wednesday, there Manchin was speaking in Washington to business and community leaders from Iowa, a state where Democrats are upset with their national party about being moved down the presidential-primary pecking order. Manchin pitched himself as “fiscally responsible and socially compassionate.”

Combine all of this with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) getting into the race for Manchin’s Senate seat two weeks ago in an increasingly deep-red state, and it’s apparent how attractive an alternate campaign might be.

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But how might that campaign look? And what impact might it have?

There is no question right now that Democrats fear a Manchin candidacy more than Republicans do, and that’s for good reason: Manchin is a Democrat — albeit an unusual one in this day and age — and former president Donald Trump hasn’t reached 47 percent of the vote in either of his two campaigns for president. Manchin’s entry would be adding variables and potentially lowering Trump’s threshold for victory.

The idea that third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein flipped the race for Trump in 2016 is overstated, but it’s hardly a ridiculous proposition that we could see a third-party spoiler, especially in our increasingly tight elections.

There also appear to be more reservations in the Democratic base about renominating President Biden than there are in the GOP base about renominating Trump. A recent poll showed that 47 percent of Democrats wanted Biden to run again, compared with 55 percent of Republicans who wanted Trump to run again. Biden also fares significantly worse in primary matchups than Trump does.

Beyond that, the constituency for such a candidacy is obviously people who don’t like either major-party nominee. This is a smaller group than the nearly half of Americans who want neither man to run (some people still like Trump and Biden but don’t want them to run, which we’ll get to). But it’s a group that currently favors Biden by a huge margin. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed Biden leading among these “double haters” by about 40 points.

Actual polling of an independent candidate’s potential impact on the 2024 campaign is harder to come by. But there are some clues.

A few pollsters have tested a race not with Manchin running third-party but rather former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). And just about all of them show Trump winning in such a scenario.

An August YouGov poll showed Biden with a slim three-point lead on Trump (Biden 42, Trump 39) in a head-to-head matchup. But you add an independent Cheney to the mix, and it flips to an eight-point lead for Trump (Biden 29, Trump 37). That’s a shift of 11 points on the margins, toward Trump.

The reason? While Cheney is a Republican, she took 16 percent of people who voted for Biden in 2020, compared to just 5 percent who voted for Trump.

But that also gets at some of the unpredictable dynamics here. Yes, Cheney is a Republican, but she’s also someone Democrats like a lot more than Republicans do, by virtue of her criticisms of Trump as a vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee.

Manchin is something of an inverse; while he’s a Democrat, Republicans actually like him better than Democrats do. Another YouGov poll, from December, showed Trump 2020 voters nearly evenly split on Manchin, but Biden voters viewed Manchin unfavorably by a wide margin, 51 percent to 21 percent.

That would suggest that the number of people on the right who would at least entertain Manchin could be more significant, depending upon the circumstances.

It’s also important not to oversell the percentage of Democrats who don’t want Biden to run again. That same recent poll that showed more resistance to Biden running again than to Trump running again also showed Democrats more willing to close ranks. While 20 percent of Democrats said they definitely wouldn’t vote for Biden if he were the nominee, 29 percent of Republicans said the same of Trump.

(A December CNN poll showed a similar difference: 22 percent of Democratic-leaning voters said they probably wouldn’t vote for Biden regardless, and 32 percent of Republican-leaning voters said the same of Trump.)

So the older Cheney polling aside, it seems that for now, Republicans like Manchin better, and more of them could be in the market for an alternative.

This all depends on how things shake out, of course. Despite the historically large resistance to Biden and Trump candidacies, the idea that anything approaching these numbers of people would actually vote against either man as a major-party nominee is fanciful. Third-party candidacies almost always poll better in theory, and people tend to come home to the major-party candidates when it’s clear that only those candidates have a chance to actually win.

It is more likely that only a very small number of the most dug-in critics of both men would feel the need to cast a principled protest vote. Much would depend upon how Biden’s first term winds down and how people view his age, along with how things such as Trump’s various legal problems are looking more than a year from now.

And that’s assuming it ever got to that point. No Labels has promised, after all, that it will not play the role of spoiler (though its criteria aren’t clear). And Manchin last month said, “I would never intend to be a spoiler of anything.”

But you could certainly forgive Democrats for worrying about it.