US senator Joe Manchin, a lifelong Democrat who left the party earlier this year to become an independent and is now stepping down from the Senate after 15 years, issued a series of warnings on Sunday to members of his former party.
“The D-brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of – it’s just, it’s toxic,” Manchin told CNN, saying he had not been able to consider himself a Democrat “in the form of what Democratic party has turned itself into”.
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 told the outlet.
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 preoccuppied 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 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 likes the president-elect and had recently told him: “I want to help any way I can” and want him to succeed.
“Every red-blooded American should want your president to succeed, whether you vote for him or not, whether the same party or not, whether you like him or not”, Manchin added.
But he also said he believed it is time for a third party in the US – called the American party – that would serve as center ground for moderate Democrats and Republicans.
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“The centrist-moderate vote decides who’s going to be the president of the United States. And when they get here, they don’t govern that way. Neither side does. They go to their respective corners,” Manchin said.
“If the center had a voice and had a party that could make both of these – the Democrat, Republican party – come back, OK, that would be something.”
In a more policy-focused sitdown on CBS’s Face the Nation, Manchin said Republican House speaker Mike Johnson would have “to come to grip that’s the worst performing Congress in the history of our country”.
Turmoil during the previous session which saw a prolonged leadership battle had tied Republicans “in knots and [they] can’t get anything through”. And he slammed the party for failing to reach out to Democrats “to continue to have a majority with some bipartisanship”.
Manchin predicted that Trump would understand his role as president “an awful lot better now than he did in 2016 when he won the first time”.
“He’s got some experience under him,” Manchin added. “He understands the process and the power that he’s wielding right now.”
