Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) told reporters on Monday that he won’t rule out leaving the Democratic Party.
Sen. Joe Manchin told reporters on Monday that he won’t rule out leaving the Democratic Party, as Sen. Kyrsten Sinema did last week — but he added it won’t be in the near future.
“I’ll look at all of these things. I’ve always looked at all those things, but I have no intention of doing anything right now,” Manchin, before adding: “Whether I do something later, I can’t tell you what the future is going to bring.” The centrist Manchin has been a member of the Democratic caucus since he was elected to the Senate in 2010. The 75-year-old former West Virginia governor, along with Sinema, have helped derail several pieces of legislation backed by the party’s rank-and-file members, including the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill. Manchin has also opposed efforts by Democrats to end the Senate filibuster rules and has blocked White House appointees.
“I’m not a Washington Democrat, I don’t know what to tell you,” Manchin told reporters. “But I have a lot of friends who aren’t Washington Republicans, and if a Washington independent is, as I said, more comfortable, you know, we’ll see what happens there, we’ll have to look.” threatened to switch his affiliation to independent“I said, me being a moderate centrist Democrat, if that causes you a problem, let me know, and I’d switch to be an independent.
“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” Sinema, 46, wrote in an op-ed for the Arizona Republic newspaper.
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