Democratic US Senator Joe Manchin will not seek re-election in 2024

Republicans hold the governor's office and the rest of the congressional delegation in a state that Republican Donald Trump won by a wide 69-30% margin over Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

By Moira Warburton WASHINGTON, Nov 9 (Reuters) -

Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a maverick who has often bucked party leadership in the past two years, said on Thursday that he will not seek re-election in 2024, greatly hurting his party's chances of holding the West Virginia seat. "I have made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for re-election to the United States Senate, but 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.

The move by the 76-year-old second-term lawmaker, now in his second term, will imperil Democrats' narrow 51-49 majority. Republicans hold the governor's office and the rest of the congressional delegation in a state that Republican Donald Trump won by a wide 69-30% margin over Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It will raise the stakes for Democrats of several other Senate races including in Republican-leaning Montana and Ohio and highly competitive Pennsylvania and Arizona.

West Virginia's Republican Governor, Jim Justice, has already launched a campaign for his party's nomination for Senate. Justice was a Democrat when he was first elected governor in 2016, but a year into office he switched parties and went on to cruise to re-election, winning 65% of the vote in 2020. Manchin has been a key vote on every major piece of legislation of President Biden's tenure, as a moderate representing an increasingly conservative state. His support was critical to passage of Biden's sweeping $1 trillion infrastructure law, one of the president's key domestic accomplishments.

Together with Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who switched her registration to independent from Democratic in December, Manchin has secured major concessions and scaling back of his party's legislative goals, winning him applause from conservatives and condemnations from many fellow Democrats. The two stood together in protecting the Senate's filibuster rule, which require 60 of the chamber's 100 members to agree on most legislation, in the face of intense opposition from their own party.

Manchin's defense of the filibuster helped block Democrats' hopes of passing bills to protect abortion rights after the Supreme Court last year overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had established the nationwide right. "What I’ve seen during my time in Washington is that every party in power will always want to exercise absolute power, absolutely," Manchin wrote in an opinion column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a West Virginia newspaper, in 2021.

The Senate has "evolved over time to make absolute power difficult while still delivering solutions to the issues facing our country and I believe that's the Senate's best quality," he added. Manchin won his last election with just 49.6% of the vote, 0.3 percentage points ahead of his Republican rival, in 2018, a year that opposition to Trump's presidency allowed Democrats to make major gains in Congress.

Manchin has insisted that his only motivation is the coal-producing state of West Virginia and an eye on fiscal responsibility. "I am guided by the words of my grandfather, who liked to say, 'Unmanaged debt will lead you to make cowardly decisions,'" he said in a February Washington Post column.