As Joe Manchin prepares to leave Congress after nearly 15 years, the West Virginia senator — who left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent earlier this year — is further distancing himself from his former party, calling the Democratic brand “toxic.”
“The D-brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of, it’s just, it’s toxic,” Manchin told CNN’s Manu Raju in a weekend interview, citing the shift as the reason why he left the party.
Adding that he no longer considers himself a Democrat “in the form of what Democratic Party has turned itself into,” Manchin — who has long been a pivotal swing vote in the Senate — said the party’s brand has become about telling people what they can and can’t do, blaming progressives for the change.
Manchin, a wealthy coal tycoon, said the party’s approach had become censorious and dictatorial to ordinary Americans, and he blamed progressives for the shift.
“They have basically expanded upon thinking, ‘Well, we want to protect you there, but we’re going to tell you how you should live your life from that far on,’” Manchin added.
Manchin predicted the country “is not going left” and said a party that has once been focused on basic issues, “good job, a good pay,” was now preoccupied with social issues that were sensitive – singling out LGBTQ+ rights – while neither they nor Republicans took responsibility for the federal budget.
The senator also said Republicans lacked common sense on the issue of gun control, and neither had adopted a reasonable approach to the perennially high number of mass shootings.
“They’re too extreme – it’s just common sense,” Manchin said of parties. “So the Democrats go too far, want to ban. The Republican says: ‘Oh, let the good times roll. Let anybody have anything they want.’”
Asked about remarks made by Greg Casar, incoming chair of the progressive wing in Congress, that Democrats would have won the election if they were more like the progressive congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, Manchin responded, “For someone to say that, they’ve got to be completely insane.”
The senator also blamed Kamala Harris’s White House election loss to Donald Trump in November on her struggle to cast herself as a moderate candidate after supporting progressive causes during her Democratic nomination run in 2019.
“If you try to be somebody you’re not, it’s hard,” Manchin noted. The senator did not publicly support Harris’s campaign. On Sunday, he declined to say which candidate he voted for in November – but said he liked the president-elect and had recently told him: “I want to help any way I can” and wanted him to succeed.