Joe Manchin may have just figured out how to fix America’s extremist problem.
Not by out-shouting the extremes. By outnumbering them.
The former West Virginia senator and real centrist has teamed up with his daughter, Heather Manchin Bresch, to launch the Independent Leadership Council, built to recruit and support independent candidates for Congress. Heather, a former Fortune 500 CEO and founder of Americans Together, is handling the data, the organization, and the infrastructure. Joe brings decades of winning elections, cutting deals, and occasionally driving both parties completely out of their minds.
In Washington, driving both parties out of their minds is usually evidence that someone is doing something right.
Here is the math that makes this interesting. Nobody needs to elect 100 independents. A handful might do it.
Picture a closely divided House with five or ten genuine independents. Some used to be Republicans. Some used to be Democrats. Some were never either. Suddenly neither party can elect a speaker, pass a budget, or move a major bill without sitting down with that group. In the Senate, two or three independents could make or break any president’s agenda, red or blue.
For years, Americans have been told we have two choices. Take everything the Democratic Party is selling, or take everything the Republican Party is selling.
Apparently nearly half the country never got that memo.
A record 45 percent of Americans now call themselves independents, according to Gallup. That is more than the Democrats. That is more than the Republicans. That is the highest number Gallup has recorded since it started asking the question in 1988. Sure, plenty of those independents still lean one way or the other. But the message could not be clearer: millions of Americans no longer feel at home in either party.
I understand them completely. I am a lifelong Democrat, and lately my own party keeps giving me reasons to sympathize.
That enormous pile of politically homeless Americans is exactly who Manchin is betting on. He thinks they can become something more than a frustration statistic.
Here is the part I like best. Manchin says he is not starting a third party. His candidates would “vote with Democrats and Republicans when they’re right” and against them when they are wrong.
Manchin is uniquely qualified to run this experiment, because he spent years as a one-man version of it.
He kept winning in West Virginia as a Democrat while Trump was carrying the state by nearly 40 points. And during President Biden’s first two years, when the Senate was split 50-50, Manchin’s vote decided everything. Democrats needed him to pass anything. Republicans needed him to block or reshape anything. He helped negotiate the infrastructure law, supported the Inflation Reduction Act, refused to kill the filibuster, and forced his own party to shrink its wish list.
You did not have to agree with every call he made. I did not. But here is the lesson: Joe Manchin became powerful not because everyone agreed with him, but because everyone had to talk to him.
Now imagine that power in the hands of a real coalition, with credible people from both traditions. All former Democrats, and it becomes a Democratic auxiliary. All former Republicans, and it becomes a Republican splinter. Both, and it stays genuinely independent. There are early signs that is the plan: Rep. Kevin Kiley of California, who left the Republican Party and is running as an independent, showed up at the council’s kickoff.
Now the honest warning. Done carelessly, independent candidates split the moderate vote and accidentally elect the biggest extremist on the ballot. Nobody needs that. The answer is discipline: run where an independent can actually win, not everywhere, just to prove a point.
And there must be standards. “Independent” cannot just mean eccentric, angry, or unable to get along with anyone. It has to mean competent, honest, willing to compromise, and flexible enough to work with people you do not particularly enjoy.
Manchin puts the problem bluntly: “Today, our national politics are broken and neither party is willing to compromise to find common ground.” He says he is fighting for America’s “sensible majority.”
He calls it the sensible majority. Around here we call it the reasonable middle. Same people. And Gallup just counted us: 45 percent and climbing.
The question is no longer whether that majority exists. It is whether it can be organized. If Manchin and his daughter recruit serious candidates and build them real infrastructure, they do not need to replace the two-party system.
They just need enough seats to make the two parties behave.
And at this point, making Washington behave would qualify as a political revolution. Just without the shouting, the manifestos, and the broken windows.
The extremists would not disappear. This is America. We cannot even agree on whether pineapple belongs on pizza. But they would matter less. That is the whole ballgame.
The Middle Is Still the Majority. Let’s Prove It.
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