(CNN) — At 78, Joe Manchin is stepping back into politics.
A year and a half after leaving office fed up with the major parties, the former West Virginia senator is launching a new effort, the Independent Leadership Council, to recruit and support independent candidates across the country.
“We’re not trying to start another party,” Manchin told CNN in an interview with his daughter, who’s also leading the council. “We’re trying to get a person who can be committed to – and totally committed to – being an independent with an independent voice. They can vote with Democrats and Republicans when they’re right and speak out against them when they’re wrong.”
Manchin kicked off the effort Thursday by convening candidates in West Virginia. Attendees include California Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former Republican running for reelection as an independent; Seth Bodnar, an independent candidate for Senate in Montana; and Michael Bridgford, an independent candidate for the House in Iowa. The group is also eying races in Alaska and Washington.
The initiative comes at a time of deepening disillusionment with both major parties, and as a record high 45% of American adults identify as political independents, according to a Gallup poll released earlier this year.
Advocates for independent candidates believe they have more momentum than in recent memory. In several states, independent candidates for Congress are attracting significant funding and the attention of their opponents from major parties. And with both chambers so closely divided, the Manchins believe an independent lawmaker can wield tremendous influence in the next Congress.
“It doesn’t take too many to say, ‘C’mon, people, get your act together,’” Manchin said. “They can bring them to their knees and make people understand, ‘This is crazy.’”
The Manchins said the summit will serve as an opening dialogue with the candidates, but if they decide to support them, they could campaign for them in person, raise money for them and help organize on the ground in their districts. If they can help even one candidate get elected in November, the father-daughter duo think they can have an impact on the next presidential election.
“Our hope is that this is kind of our pilot, experiment, trying to prove it can be done,” Heather Manchin, a former pharmaceutical executive, said, “and then I think Katie bar the door if it can be done.”
Other people involved in the new group include Adam Brandon and Seth Cohen, who are both senior advisers at the Independent Center, a nonprofit that advocates for independent voters. Brandon is the former head of the conservative group FreedomWorks, while Cohen is the former chief impact officer at Forbes Media and an advocate for voting rights.
Manchin’s disillusionment
The effort may be Joe Manchin’s biggest political project since he retired from the Senate in January 2025. Fed up with the extremes in both major parties, he spent his final months in office as an independent after serving as a Democrat for decades.
Since leaving the Senate, Manchin has published a book, promoted his daughter’s centrist political nonprofit, Americans Together, and continued to make appearances in Washington. Last month, he joined a panel discussion on the national debt at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, where the moderator was one of his former colleagues, Republican Rob Portman of Ohio.
“Manchin is sometimes a Democrat, sometimes an independent, sometimes a Republican,” Portman said at one point. “I just don’t know quite where he is today.”
“I don’t either,” Manchin quipped.
Manchin, a frequent critic of the progressive left, is concerned about the rise of democratic socialists who’ve been winning Democratic primaries across the country, suggesting it’s a product of a party “without a national figure.” But he said Republicans are still too beholden to their extremes as well and argued open primaries would address the broader issue.
“When they have closed primaries, what they were able to do is hijack the system,” Manchin said, bringing up the recent New York primary where candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, did well. “They’ve been able to outperform in a closed system.”
Surveying the current Senate, Manchin lamented what he described as a lack of deal-makers in his mold. He said he was unsure which senators there now are telling their colleagues: “C’mon, guys, let’s go talk. Sit this down. Let’s work this out.”
“That bothers me,” Manchin said.
One of the more independent-minded Senate Democrats these days is Sen. John Fetterman, whose frustrations with his party have raised the possibility he could leave it. Asked if Fetterman should become an independent, Manchin said the Pennsylvania senator “needs to do what John’s comfortable doing.” But he suggested Fetterman, a onetime critic of Manchin, was from a different political mold.
“He’s for all the hardcore Democrat issues that I wasn’t for,” Manchin said.
While Manchin weighed a presidential run in 2024 with the centrist group No Labels — and says he misses his many “friends” in the Senate — he no longer seems interested in running for office.
“I don’t see me getting back into the fray, I really don’t,” he said. “I think I’ve tried it for 42, 43, 44, years and been fairly successful at working with people on both sides and bringing people together. Now I’m trying to help people around the country that want that same outcome.”
An independent moment
Instead, Manchin is deepening his work for independent politicians during a moment when they have a new champion in Congress and viable candidates across the midterm map.
In California, Kiley is seeking reelection as an independent for an open seat in a Democratic-leaning district after a wave of mid-decade redistricting. Kiley, who continues to caucus with Republicans, faces Democrat Richard Pan in November’s general election.
In an interview, Kiley said he wants to be part of building more infrastructure for independents like himself and is “very happy” to be working with Manchin.
“He’s someone who demonstrated during his time in office that he was willing to go against both sides when necessary to serve his constituents,” Kiley said. “[There are] plenty of policy issues where we came out in different ways, but that’s OK. We need more people like that who are independent-minded.”
Despite the optimism around independent candidates in the midterms, they continue to face significant structural challenges, such as gaining ballot access and fundraising without a built-in network, as well as hurdles unique to their own races. In Montana, Bodnar is locked in a standoff with Democratic nominee Alani Bankhead who has resisted pressure to drop out and give the former University of Montana president a more direct matchup against GOP nominee Kurt Alme.
That happened in Nebraska, where Democratic Senate nominee Cindy Burbank ended her campaign to give Dan Osborn, who is running again as an independent after a strong 2024 showing, a clearer field against GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts. And in Alaska’s only congressional district, independent Bill Hill’s fortunes recently rose after his most serious Democratic opponent, pastor Matt Schultz, dropped out and endorsed Hill.
Hill, a commercial fisherman and former superintendent of his local school district, is part of a crowded field running in an all-party primary on August 18 for the seat currently held by Republican Rep. Nick Begich
During a recent interview in Anchorage, shortly after returning from a week on his boat fishing salmon in Bristol Bay, he outlined a varied political history. He said he has voted for Republicans Sen. Lisa Murkowski and the late former Sen. Ted Stevens. Hill said he supports abortion rights — a largely Democratic position — but is also “pro-Second Amendment because firearms are an important tool for my subsistence lifestyle.”
“Like most Alaskans, I don’t fit into a neat little political box,” he said, noting that nearly two-thirds of Alaska voters are not registered with either major party. “I’ve been a lifelong independent, and I wouldn’t run otherwise.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
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