Since announcing he won’t run again for Senate, Joe Manchin has left open the door to a third-party presidential campaign. Democrats are naturally anxious about the West Virginia senator’s intentions, fearful of the possible effects of an independent bid on Joe Biden’s reelection chances.

They have good cause to worry: A presidential run would be a fitting capstone for Manchin, who’s built a career around putting his own interests ahead of his party. His brand of centrism has helped him survive West Virginia’s rapid transformation from a blue to red state. But it also helped sow the seeds of the Democratic Party’s demise back home.

I started covering Manchin during his tenure as governor, long before there was a whole microeconomy in Washington devoted to reading his tea leaves. At the time, I was a statehouse reporter for the now-defunct Charleston Daily Mail and, even before that, got a taste of Manchin world as a student journalist when I covered a scandal involving his daughter at West Virginia University. (The same daughter is now helping to pitch donors on a $100 million political project to boost centrism.)

By then, he had already submarined the party once: When he first ran for governor in 1996, Manchin lost the Democratic primary to Charlotte Pritt, a progressive fan favorite. That fall, just before the election, Manchin — who has always been business minded — made clear he wasn’t supporting Pritt in the general election and was instead backing the Republican who went on to win.

Politically, he came of age in an era when climate change and energy issues began to take center stage and a subtle shift was underway in state politics. For decades, there was a divide within the coal industry between union miners and company management, a conflict that historically resulted in notorious strikes and violence in West Virginia’s coalfields. Prominent West Virginia Democrats — notably Sens. Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller — were rooted more deeply in that era when state Democrats supported the coal industry, yes, but from the point of view........

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