Joe Manchin Has Some Unsolicited Advice for Kamala Harris and the Democrats

“I didn’t like being a senator,” Joe Manchin told me last week — quite the statement from arguably the most influential senator of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris era. But he’s also been the most divisive member of the Senate Democratic caucus: too conservative for the left on party priorities like abortion, climate change and voting rights and too unyielding on the filibuster. Now he’s had enough. He left the party in May to become an independent, and he’s leaving the Senate in January.

But he’s not done trying to make a case that the path to victory in November and beyond runs through the nation’s political center. And he has high hopes for Harris, the Democrats’ new nominee — indeed, more insights and words of praise about her than I expected.

Just days before the Democratic convention in Chicago, the West Virginia senator and I sat down for a Zoom chat about his assessment of his former party and the Republicans, the path he sees for Ms. Harris, his flirtation with a third-party presidential run, how he sees bipartisanship today and the sort of cross-aisle relationship building he seeks to foster on Almost Heaven, the houseboat he keeps in Washington. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Cottle: As Democrats gather for their convention, I’m curious about how you see the party today and if you are any more or less certain about your decision to leave and become an independent.

Joe Manchin: Yeah, well, I’ve been independent all my life, but I’ve never looked at party politics as “I had to pick a side, and the other side was my enemy.” That’s how I was raised in a little coal-mining town of Farmington, Michelle, and I never heard anybody speak ill of the other side. I never thought being a Democrat defined me. I think I just knew I was always an independent. I have always considered myself fiscally responsible and socially compassionate, where I think most Americans are.

Then I went to the Senate, and I’ll never forget it: It had to be early 2011, and there was a vote that Harry Reid came and said, “This is going to be a party-line vote.” Now, mind you, I’ve been involved since 1982, and I never heard the term “party line.” It means everyone, just because you’re on that team, have a D or an R by your name, we got to all vote the same. So I said, “Harry, let me read the bill, and I’ll get back to you.” So I read the bill, and I said, “Harry, on my best day, I can’t sell this crap in West Virginia. That’s on my best day. I can’t sell it.” I said, “So I’m going to vote what I think I can go home and explain.” And, man, he got mad. They put the full-court press on me for a couple of months.

First of all, Michelle, I didn’t like being a senator. I didn’t like being there, because I missed where I came from. And for the two years I was in the Senate knowing I could have still been governor were the most miserable years of my life. Isn’t that awful? So maybe I was rebelling to a certain extent. I don’t know, but I just didn’t care. I said, “I’m not going to change who I am, and I’m not happy being here.”

Cottle: So you hung in there for so long. Was there a specific trigger for what finally did it, like a particular vote?

Manchin: Probably the 50-50 Senate. You have to play this team sport, and you know, they make you pick a side. So I realized then that this is not who I am. I never changed. I wasn’t any different than the 30 or 31 other Democrats who signed the bipartisan letter in 2017 that was sent to Mitch McConnell begging him not to get rid of the filibuster, OK? And then there was only two of us left as soon as Joe Biden won in 2020. And then 2021 comes. What happened to the other senators? I didn’t change. They changed. So they keep looking, “Well, you got to do this.” And I said, “No, I don’t. I really don’t, and I’m not going to.”

Cottle: So it was a statement of sorts.

Manchin: Yeah, that was my statement. Don’t believe that you ever owned me, because you know you haven’t. And don’t believe that you really own me now, because you’re never going to.

Cottle: Is the party doing a good job reaching out to independents and moderates like you, or are the Democrats heading in the wrong direction? The presidential ticket and the Senate and House Democrats will need moderate votes in November.

Manchin: There’s an awful lot of people in the Democratic caucus that feel like I do, to a certain extent. They need to speak up more. And there’s a lot of people in the Republican caucus that aren’t Trumpsters that need to speak up more. And hopefully they will. But if they are always in a very tight Senate, they really didn’t have to if they knew where I was always going to be, so “Why stick my neck out when Joe’s always willing to do it?” And people say, “How do you take the pressure?” I never felt pressure, Michelle. I never, ever, ever felt pressure, because I didn’t have to be somebody I wasn’t. I didn’t have to think, “I’ve got to transform and play to this audience,” you know? I’m just who I am. And they can look at my voting record since I’ve been in public office from the early ’80s. It never changed.

Cottle: Was there a point in the last few years when you looked at Democrats and you thought, “They’re starting to get into trouble politically” or in terms of policy, with moderates and independents and more conservative Democrats?

Manchin: On both sides, I’ve seen that we’ve killed good legislation because of politics. You can go back to 2013. We had a bipartisan immigration bill. Passed it with 68 or 69 senators. It went over to the House. And John Boehner was the speaker. And John’s a friend of mine. I called him. I said, “John, can you put it on the floor? It’ll pass. You know it will pass, John.” It was well done. We secured the border. We had a pathway to citizenship, which was very, very tough. You wouldn’t be fighting what we are today. And John looked at me, and he said, “Joe, I can’t do it.” He said, “Eric Cantor just got beaten in Richmond by a far-right extremist who said, ‘By supporting this piece of legislation, Eric Cantor was for amnesty,’ and that’s how he beat him.” So the rest of the Republican caucus was afraid.

Then you have Roe v. Wade. For 50 years, it was precedented law. We learned how to maneuver. And with the Dobbs decision, they threw it out in the most divisive time of our country. So you would think, normally, “Why can’t we just codify Roe v. Wade? Just codify it.” So Susan Collins, my dear friend Lisa Murkowski and myself, you know, we have a bipartisan piece of legislation that simply codifies it. That’s all. It won’t be precedent. It’ll be the law of the land, and every state will abide by it.

Well, the Democrats were trying to pass a piece of legislation, and I was sitting in caucus one day, and they were trying to explain that we’re codifying Roe v. Wade. When I read the bill, it went way further than codifying Roe v. Wade. And I just asked the question in caucus, “Are you trying to make people believe that what you’re doing here is just codifying Roe v. Wade, which we’ve talked about?” I said, “This does more, much more than that.” And I walked out, like, “This is crazy. You guys have lost your mind.” They voted the bill anyway, and I voted against it. So those types of things. Politics killed that. They wanted to play to the base.

I’m trying to make people explain. They come to me, and I said, “Do you understand that only 23 percent of Americans are Democrats, only 25 percent are Republicans and 51 percent are, like me, no party affiliation?” I said, “You can’t win without the middle. Why are you continually throwing meat at the extremes? They’re fine. They’re well fed. But you’re not going to win that way.” It just doesn’t make any sense to me at all that you can’t find that moderate middle, to where people say, “Yeah, that’s how I live my life. That’s what I expect you to do.” And it’s not exciting. You expect us to do the right thing. When someone talks common sense, no one gets excited. No one sends money at the fund-raisers. But if you say something stupid and crazy, I guarantee you you’ll be flooded.

‘I’ve been surprised. She’s done some good things.’

Cottle: So how does Vice President Harris fit into all of this as now the party’s standard-bearer? You’ve watched her closely in the last three and a half years.

Manchin: I’ve been surprised. She’s done some good things. First of all, my relationship with Kamala goes back to when she came into the Senate. Back then, she and I sat on the Intelligence Committee for one year together, side by side. So we were very close, worked well together. She’s very bright, very smart. She’s even been to the boat with me for dinner. She came one time that was very nice. We try to build a collegial type of attitude, and my boat had always been a place we could do it. You get eight senators. You might get four D’s and four R’s. I’d always try to balance it out. And we’d have, you know, some food and drinks. And we sit there and talk. And at the end of the night, we all play Lee Greenwood’s “proud to be an American,” and everybody would hug.

First of all, I think you knew that I was hoping that we could have a mini-primary when President Biden stepped aside. I just thought it would be great. The issues could have gotten out, and there are a lot of great young people. The torch needs to be passed.

What she’s been able to do in three weeks has been amazing. I think she’s put a vivacious energy to this campaign. It looks like they’re having fun and they’re enjoying it. And people are excited about this. So she’s got people fired up, and I think she’s done an unbelievable job in the three weeks or so she’s been there.

And I see her change her position on fracking. You have to understand, when you’re a senator, your people that elect you are your constituents. That’s who you work for. She’s representing California. Well, California can be much more different from West Virginia than the man in the moon. We’re so different. So I respect that, coming from San Francisco — I respect that.

But now, facing this leadership as one of the most powerful people in the world, she’s looking at where we stand on energy, and I’m happy for that. There’s a lot more that I think needs to be done in energy policy.

Cottle: So it feels like she’s doing a little bit of course correcting because she’s going to have a broader constituency?

Manchin: I think, you know, leadership — leaders have to step forward and lead. And you can’t be just in your safety zone or where you come from. I think she’s seeing that very clearly and announcing that she would codify Roe v. Wade — without any amendments to it or expansions of abortions and things of this sort. And that’s a good move, too. So the things I have seen have been positive.

Cottle: In terms of President Biden’s major legislative achievements, I’m curious if you’d agree with this idea, which is that his agenda wound up getting overhauled or pared back, like Build Back Better, and his record wound up reflecting a lot of your ideas and priorities, like the Inflation Reduction Act. Is it fair to say that the Biden-Harris record is really the Biden-Manchin record?

Manchin: No. No matter what input a senator has — and we all have the same amount of ability to have input — a lot of them didn’t exercise it. That’s all. So I was caught where I was caught, and I was trying to always look at something that I can improve things, make it better. Well, $35 for insulin made things better. Being able to produce gas and oil and use the fossil fuel that we have cleaner than anywhere in the world, replace the dirty fossil fuel being produced around the world made it better. I’m just trying to find a balance all the time. You run your life in the middle. Can’t we run our country from the middle?

Cottle: As I mentioned earlier, we’re talking just before the Democratic convention, where presumably a lot of what they’re going to focus on or what their priorities are will get spelled out. So what’s on your mind, and what will you be watching for, especially in terms of the far-left influence or the partisan extremism? What makes you nervous, and what are you hopeful about?

Manchin: The things I’ve heard so far from Kamala and her team have been encouraging — the things we just talked about. If she does more of that — lays out a broader package of how we’re going to stabilize Social Security and Medicare and protect them but also look at basically getting our financial house in order — would be something I think that people understand. Every household has to do it. Every business has to do it. Why not the government? No one is speaking about it. It’s not sexy. I understand.

The defense of our country, having a strong military, investing in that. The border is extremely serious and dangerous, extremely serious and dangerous. We had a situation that got out of hand under the Biden administration. But also the Biden administration was willing to step up to the plate and agree to a Republican bipartisan agreement that President Trump shot down because of politics. Again, she can double down on that and commit to strengthening and securing that border. I think that would be great to hear from that. Just some solid things that people want, so you don’t scare the bejesus out of the free-enterprise capitalist system that we have.

‘I never thought I had the power’

Cottle: We’ve touched on this a little bit in pieces, but I’d like to hear more generally your reflections on the best way to use power to advance the nation’s interest. You became maybe the most powerful person on Capitol Hill during the Biden administration. How did you think about approaching that power, supporting or stopping things that concerned you?

Manchin: I never thought I had the power. I was one of 100.

Cottle: Oh, but come on. At some point it must have become clear that if you were the one willing to stick your head up —

Manchin: The one basically it comes down to because the rest fall in line. That’s what is hard for me to believe, Michelle — that other people wouldn’t exercise the same ability, the same rights that I had. So when it came down to that, I looked at it from the standpoint of “Can I go home and explain it?” It was always as simple as that. Can I go back to Farmington, W.V., a town of less than 500, 600 people on a good day, and people I grew up with, and can I explain it in a way that makes sense?

Cottle: Presumably it helped that you could tell Chuck Schumer or whoever, “My people back home aren’t going to swallow this.”

Manchin: Chuck and I have a good relationship. I have a lot of respect for Chuck. And I agree to disagree. He knows that. I think he and I push back, and we get into some really good discussions. It gets a little heated at times. One time we got pretty animated. We’re in his office and going back and forth, maybe holler a little bit, screaming a little bit too much, too loud. Someone said, “What’s happening?” He said, “Oh, no, we just have a New York Jew and a West Virginia Italian going at it right now, but they’ll be OK.”

Cottle: What role did Vice President Harris play in your legislative discussions with the White House in 2021 and ’22 when all of this was going on?

Manchin: I’m sure she was kept aware of that. She wasn’t in negotiations.

Cottle: She gave interviews in West Virginia to the media in 2021 that were widely read as an attempt to pressure you to get with the administration program. And my read and a lot of people’s read was that that attempt backfired. Is that off base?

Manchin: I understood that. You know, I’m sure that she was directed to do that. And I think it would have come from the chief of staff of the president. And I never looked at it that way. They knew me well enough. I guess they were testing, and they didn’t know me that well when he first came in. They figured out who I was pretty quick, and that wasn’t going to change me at all. And I never held any ill feelings toward that whatsoever. She was doing her job as a good, loyal soldier, being the vice president, being the president’s emissary, if you will. And I’m sure that they said. “Well, you got to put a little pressure.”

Cottle: How seriously did you consider running for president this time around? Walk us through your thinking.

Manchin: Well, there was a period of time — you’re talking about with the No Labels group.

Cottle: Yeah.

Manchin: The reason I’ve always been a fan of No Labels was when I got there at the end of 2010 and I saw how disjointed and dysfunctional it was, I said, “This is a hostile working environment.” I said, “People aren’t supposed to be working together on the other side.” That’s not who I am. I was always enamored of having Democrats and Republicans. I’d always known they’re willing to still work together. And Joe Lieberman was my dear friend, and then this thing started moving to where they were going to get on all the ballots. And I said, “Well that’d be very interesting,” because they were all thinking, “Well, it would come down to Biden and Trump.” And the majority of the country way back then, you could tell a couple of years ago, wasn’t going in that direction.

What happened — it was just harder and I think more costly than what they thought, as far as trying to go on 50 ballots. I knew if you didn’t get on 50 ballots and couldn’t be able to debate and talk about where the country should be — not where the country is or who’s to blame but “How do you fix it?” — if you couldn’t do that, you couldn’t defend yourself. So you end up being a spoiler. And I didn’t want to go down in history thinking, “Oh, well, Manchin caused so-and-so to get elected or caused so-and-so to get defeated.”

But I would have liked to. I said, “Somehow, somebody has got to speak for the 51 percent of the people in the middle.” That’s what I’m trying to do.

Cottle: Are you a little sorry that you’re not running for Senate again this time?

Manchin: No, not at all. Not at all. I didn’t want another six-year sentence.

Cottle: Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans have taken credit for this, for basically driving you out of the race by recruiting a tough-to-beat, popular candidate. How much did the prospect of a completely brutal race affect your decision to just finally say, “Enough”?

Manchin: No, I made up my mind a long time ago. I didn’t want to be 83 years old and still be in the Senate. That being said, if I had been 10 years younger, I would have enjoyed the race. But going in, knowing it would have been my last race and having to be so, so negative and it would have been a true war — I didn’t want to put my state through it. I didn’t want to put my family through it, and I didn’t want to go at my opponent. And Jim Justice I’ve known for a long time. We’ve been friends. And it turns out politics changes people. Jim’s changed because of politics. He changed from a Democrat to a Republican in seven months, after he was a Democrat and we all worked to get him elected. And that didn’t matter. I mean, everyone has their own right. I just didn’t want to have such a negative campaign. I truly believe that I would have won.

Cottle: Biden came in not as a very partisan figure or even as a very liberal figure. Were you disappointed or surprised when he decided to step out of this race?

Manchin: Joe Biden has been pulled so far to the left after he was elected that it was not the Joe Biden I knew all these years, and I kept saying that. I’m hopeful that my friend who I’ve known can come back to where I know he always has been, where his comfort is, in the middle.

Joe could always make a deal. I’ll give you an example. When the government shut down in 2013, President Obama sent Joe Biden out to get this government opened up. Joe Biden went right over to his friend Mitch McConnell; they sat down, made a deal. I’ll never forget: We walked into the caucus after that, Harry Reid was boiling mad, and he told the caucus, “I told the president, ‘Don’t you send that damn Joe Biden up here to make any more deals.’” So Joe would always make the deal, OK? That’s the Joe I knew. And that was the Joe I was hoping I would see. But that didn’t happen.

But I’m happy for him and the peace of mind he has and his health and well-being. He’s going to have a heck of a legacy, I believe. He’s got a chance to do some things here in four and five months. See, I believe the presidency should be a one six-year term.

Cottle: So that you don’t worry about getting re-elected.

Manchin: I think that the Supreme Court should be one 18-year term. I think the Senate should be two six-year terms and the House should be six two-year terms. I went to a town-hall meeting way back when I was a governor, and I was defending why you shouldn’t do term limits, because you can lose some of your best people, you lose all this experience. And this lady looked at me and said, “Think about this, Joe. If we had term limits, maybe we might get one good term out of you.” How do you argue with that?

Cottle: Harsh but fair.

Manchin: She convinced me.

Cottle: If a close friend were to ask you how you regard Harris, just a wide-open question, what would you tell them?

Manchin: I had a good relationship. We could talk. Intelligence is one of the most challenging committees. It meets more than any other. So we had a lot of time sitting beside each other. Nothing I knew that was unexpected or that was meanspirited. She was who she was. And she represented her state of California. And I’ll never forget the time — in I think it was 2019 — that we did a bipartisan bill trying to get the money out for all of the disasters we had. And my state got hit hard with disasters in the 2016 flood, and Texas got hit hard. And John Cornyn and I were on a bill, Thom Tillis and — guess what — Kamala Harris. And she didn’t have a lot into that, but she stepped into that and made it bipartisan. That helped us basically force the Trump administration to put the money out.

Cottle: Are you comfortable that she’s ready to be president?

Manchin: I’m seeing a lot of movement in these three weeks that seems to have got a lot of energy going, and it’s very positive. And Tim Walz — here’s a person I’ve known for eight years, and he was in the House, and I was in the Senate. Tim was always a happy warrior. A pleasant person to work with. And he was representing a very conservative area at that time, so he was always very modest, very easy to work with, trying to find a pathway forward. I just enjoyed him so much, and we became friends. I think it was a wise pick. She had a deep bench to pick from, and I think she made a very good decision here.

Cottle: His politics as governor were certainly not yours. So how do you see him helping on the ticket?

Manchin: The only thing I know is that Tim has always been very, very centered, moderate, easy to work with when I knew him in Congress. I saw little tidbits about when he was coaching and some of his players were talking about him. That tells you more than anything. It tells the people that basically, “Here’s a person that tried to help guide my life and made an impression on me to be a better human being,” and I think that shows through. Tim will make good decisions.

‘You need to build a resilient middle’

Cottle: When they leave, lawmakers often talk about how much the House or Senate has changed over their time. In your experience, was this true for the Senate as an institution, or is this just overstated and kind of cheap nostalgia?

Manchin: Well, there’s still a lot of camaraderie. You have to work on it a little bit. You have to work to have dinner with a Republican if you’re a Democrat or vice versa. And you have to pick up the tab every now and then. Take your turn. Be a good sport. And invite them down to the boat. Come have some beer and a glass of wine and some food. I’ve done everything I can to try to bring it together and create more camaraderie. But I can tell you the big business, the duopoly of the Democrat-Republican business, is greater than you can fight from within. So I’m hoping on the outside now with my daughter Heather at Americans Together, that we can show people.

Cottle: Is that your next step?

Manchin: Well, I’m going to help her any way I can. I mean, I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I haven’t been able to talk about that yet. I intend to be speaking out. I’m looking for “How do you get a better primary process? How do we get better candidates?” I like the open primaries. When you think about the primary process, if it hadn’t been for the jungle primary that they had up in Alaska, my friend Lisa Murkowski might not have gotten back.

Cottle: Former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, another centrist Democrat, used to joke: You know what happens if you try to be in the middle of the road in the Senate? You wind up roadkill. What advice do you have for those who want to go that way?

Manchin: Hindsight being 20/20, I think what I could have done differently is spend much more time telegraphing the purpose and the reasons things need to be done. I just assume the common-sense people would realize, “OK, you need to do this.” And it was easy for me to make the decision. What I didn’t realize was that with the business of politics now being the D’s and the R’s, they’d already spent so much time, effort and money to sell their position. We don’t have the tools to fight that. You need to build a resilient middle, if you will. A resilient middle has to be able to say, “No, that’s too far. You can’t do that. It won’t stand up.”

Cottle: Anything else on your mind about you, the Senate, the ticket, the convention?

Manchin: If you haven’t gotten enough now to destroy me, I’m in trouble anyway.

Cottle: You’re undestroyable now, right? That’s the beauty of being you.

Manchin: I’m totally committed to a sensible, moderate middle that has no one speaking for them, that aren’t represented to the level that they should be represented, and the system is designed against them. The system is the business model where that middle’s got to follow one side or the other.

Cottle: It sounds like what you see are kind of big-picture, systemic changes.

Manchin: Yeah, I do. I mean, if you look at 1796, his farewell speech, George Washington, he said: Beware of political parties, for they will usurp the power from the people. That’s exactly what is happening. They’re usurping the power from the people and only giving you two choices.

Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion and is a host of the podcast “Matter of Opinion.”

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