Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has been dropping periodic hints he might plan to run in the 2024 presidential election and the centrist Democrat is not even ruling out running as a third-party candidate.
"When you're asking me what I'm going to do and what my political ambitions would be, it's to make the country work together and be a United States and not the divided states — and that's what I've seen happen over the period of time," Manchin told NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd, who was pressing him on 2024 and whether he would rule out a run as a No Labels candidate.
"I'm going to do whatever I can to have a voice in that middle, that we can basically force both sides to say, 'Wait a minute, you've gone to extremes. You've got to start coming back. You've got to find ways to solve problems.'"
Manchin hailed himself as the man in the middle of both sides of the aisle, but notably all independents in Congress caucus as Democrats. Also, Manchin had once teased a potential move to the Republican Party, but those rumors remained just that.
"If you look at the last 40 years I've been involved in public service through my great state of West Virginia and since I've been a senator representing the state of West Virginia, it's always been about being a centrist in the middle," Manchin told Todd. "I tell people I'm fiscally responsible and socially compassionate, which I think [for] most Americans they've been driven to the corners to pick a side."
The answers have to come from the middle in a harshly divided body politic, according to Manchin.
"You can't solve them from the extreme right and the extreme left," he continued. "You can't make people pick a side: 'Which side are you on?' 'Well, I'll choose the left or the right, or the D or the R because this one's not as bad as that one.'
"Neither of them are doing the job the way we should do it, but one's not as bad as the other, so you pick a side. I think we can do better than that, and if we can change that dialogue and have a movement, Chuck, then we've done our job."
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