Sen. Joe Manchin won’t seek re-election in 2024, adding to Democrats’ challenges

Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a maverick who has often bucked party leadership in the past two years, said on Thursday that he will not seek re-election in 2024, greatly hurting his party's chances of holding the West Virginia seat.

"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, but what I will be doing is travelling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together," Manchin said in a statement.

The move by the 76-year-old lawmaker will imperil Democrats' narrow 51-49 majority. Republicans hold the governor's office and the rest of the congressional delegation in a state that Republican Donald Trump won by a wide 69-30 per cent margin over Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

"We like our odds in West Virginia," Steve Daines, the head of Republican senators' campaign arm, said in a statement.

Manchin earlier this year flirted publicly with leaving the Democratic Party, and also appeared in July at an event with the "No Labels" group, where he discussed the possibility of having a third-party candidate run for president in 2024.

Polling shows dissatisfaction with the current leading White House candidates; both the incumbent Biden and Trump, the Republican frontrunner.

Raises stakes in Senate races

Manchin's departure will also raise the stakes for Democrats of several other Senate races including in Republican-leaning Montana and Ohio and highly competitive Pennsylvania and Arizona.

Democrats currently hold more of the seats that are up for election than do Republicans. Three seats held by Democrats are in states won by Trump in the 2020 election, while no Republican seats up for the election are in states where voters chose Biden.

David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Senate Democrats' campaign arm, said the party was confident in its chances of strengthening its majority.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, has already launched a campaign for his party's nomination for Senate. Justice was a Democrat when he was first elected governor in 2016, but a year into office he switched parties and went on to cruise to re-election, winning 65 per cent of the vote in 2020. Trump has endorsed Justice.

Manchin, who took office in 2010, has been a key vote on every major piece of legislation of Biden's tenure, as a moderate representing an increasingly conservative state. His support was critical to passage of Biden's sweeping $1-trillion US infrastructure law, one of the president's key domestic accomplishments.

Together with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who switched her registration to Independent from Democratic in December, Manchin has secured major concessions and scaling back of his party's legislative goals, winning him applause from conservatives and condemnations from many fellow Democrats.

Supported maintaining filibuster rule

The two stood together in protecting the Senate's filibuster rule, which requires 60 of the chamber's 100 members to agree on most legislation, in the face of intense opposition from their own party.

Manchin's defence of the filibuster helped block Democrats' hopes of passing bills to protect abortion rights after the Supreme Court last year overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had established the nationwide right.

"What I've seen during my time in Washington is that every party in power will always want to exercise absolute power, absolutely," Manchin wrote in an opinion column for The Charleston Gazette-Mail, a West Virginia newspaper, in 2021.

The Senate has "evolved over time to make absolute power difficult while still delivering solutions to the issues facing our country and I believe that's the Senate's best quality," he added.

Republican senators praised Manchin's commitment to bipartisanship.

"I will miss this American patriot in the Senate. But our friendship and our commitment to American values will not end," Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, who is also not seeking re-election, wrote in a post on X.

Manchin won his last election with just 49.6 per cent of the vote, 0.3 percentage points ahead of his Republican rival, in 2018, a year that opposition to Trump's presidency allowed Democrats to make major gains in Congress.