Energy Champion Joe Manchin Says He Won’t Run for Re-election in Blow to Democrats

“What I will be doing is traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together,” Manchin said in a statement.

Manchin is an original honorary co-chairman of No Labels, a group that started as a centrist policy group but which is now laying the groundwork for a possible independent campaign for president. He also participated in a No Labels event in New Hampshire in July, declining to rule out a presidential run as he complained that “There’s no voice for the middle” in US politics.

Democratic leaders had strongly recruited Manchin to run for reelection to the Senate.

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice, who switched from Democrat to Republican during the Trump administration, and conservative Republican Representative Alex Mooney, are running for the GOP nomination for the Senate seat.

Manchin has often frustrated his fellow Democrats, particularly when he torpedoed President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better bill in 2021 and, later, blocked an effort to defang the Senate’s filibuster rule to pass other Democratic priorities including a sweeping voting rights package.

But Manchin’s backing proved key to a series of bipartisan deals on infrastructure and many other issues, and he was the principal author of the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes provisions on climate and energy, Medicare prescription drug price cuts, increased tax enforcement and a new 15% minimum tax on corporations making at least $1 billion a year.