Sen. Joe Manchin says he “absolutely” can see himself as president.
Privately, the West Virginia Democrat has told people that a Joe Biden health scare or a Donald Trump conviction could give him an opening to run as an independent this year.
In public, during stops in states such as New Hampshire, South Carolina and Georgia, Manchin says he believes there’s a role for him as a national icon in the “fiscally responsible and socially compassionate” middle, comparable with the role Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders plays for the progressive left.
If Manchin runs, he would want to do so using state ballot lines being secured by No Labels, a bipartisan group that has asserted itself as the answer for a political moment in which voters keep telling pollsters they don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch and are exhausted by the political tribalism. The group has set a mid-March deadline to decide whether to back a presidential “unity ticket,” but with about a month and half to go and amid internal turmoil, multiple top No Labels leaders tell CNN they remain in the dark about the path forward.
Meanwhile, three years of exhaustion at Manchin upending Biden’s agenda has left the president and top aides keeping their distance, trying to sound out what he’s up to without risking riling him up by going to him directly. They hope Manchin will ultimately decide on his own against an independent run. But they know that a Democratic senator traveling the county warning that Biden has been pulled too far to the political left would be a problem, particularly as the president and his aides try to stitch back their 2020 coalition that ranged from Sanders supporters to anti-Trump Republicans.
Manchin is hoping to get a meeting with Biden to urge the president to change the way he’s campaigning – for example, to focus more on how inflation declined…
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