Joe Manchin becomes latest senator to call for Biden to quit 2024 race

West Virginia senator’s own retirement threatens to hand Senate to Republicans

Senator Joe Manchin has become the third member of the Democratic caucus in the upper chamber to call on Joe Biden to step aside.

No longer officially a Democrat himself, Manchin is retiring at the end of this year rather than seek re-election. His seat in deep-red West Virginia is thought to be a likely pickup for Republicans, led by their nominee Jim Justice.

Despite leaving the party he was a member of for decades, Manchin continued to caucus with the Senate Democrats after registering as an independent this past May.

“I came to the decision with a heavy heart that it’s time to pass the torch to a new generation,” said the West Virginia senator.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-W. Va.):

"I think it's time to pass the torch to a new generation." pic.twitter.com/fHkQOTZzkU

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) July 21, 2024

He would go on to subtly hint that he did not think Vice President Kamala Harris should be the party’s pick either, explaining that he was “partial” to the idea of his party selecting a state governor instead.

“I’m very hopeful it would be done in an open process,” he continued. “I think we have a lot of talent on the bench. A lot of good people. And I’m partial to governors, because governors can’t affort to be [partisan].”

Biden hands a pen that he used to sign the Inflation Reduction Act to Manchin, left, in August 2022, as Chuck Schumer, who is believed to also want the president to quit the race, stands between them (Getty Images)

Asked on ABC by Martha Raddatz whether Harris could beat Trump in November at the top of the ticket, Manchin replied: “The process will show that.”

His statement follows two other Democrats in the Senate, Martin Heinrich and Peter Welch, calling for the incumbent president to step aside and let another Democrat run in the wake of a shocking debate performance in June. The senator made his comments in two inteviews on ABC’s This Week and CNN’s State of the Union.

Manchin joins dozens of other elected Democrats, counting both senators and members of the House of Representatives, in his view. It’s also one that largely follows American public thinking, where clear majorities of both Democrats and voters as a whole believe that Biden is too old to run again. The president’s loyalists have fought this tooth and nail, insisting that the polling of their own parties’ voters is wrong and that the president’s worsening deficit behind Donald Trump is surmountable by November.

Biden, as vice-president, swears in Manchin as US senator for West Virginia in 2010 (Getty Images)

One of those loyalists, Biden’s close ally in the Congressional Black Caucus, Jim Clyburn, urged his party to coalesce around their presumed nominee in a separate interview Sunday following Manchin’s on CNN’s State of the Union.

The decision by Manchin to speak up comes on the same day as a new poll of Michigan suggests that Joe Biden has slipped out of the margin of error and is now significantly trailing the opponent he beat in that state in 2020.