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Jamelle Bouie

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

It seems to be quite the year for third-party presidential candidates.

There’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent alternative to President Biden and Donald Trump. There is Cornel West, a professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary, who is also running as an independent. And there is Jill Stein, running again for the Green Party nomination.

And later we may have another entrant: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who will retire from the Senate in January at the end of his term.

“Privately,” reports Edward-Isaac Dovere for CNN, “the West Virginia Democrat has told people that a Joe Biden health scare or a Donald Trump conviction could give him an opening to run as an independent this year.”

If Manchin runs, he would probably do so under the banner of No Labels, the centrist political group devoted to bipartisan political activism. No Labels — whose backers, according to a 2023 report in Mother Jones, “are donors who contributed millions of dollars to Republican causes,” including groups supporting Trump’s re-election in 2020 — has been promoting a unity ticket for the upcoming presidential election. Manchin, a conservative Democrat, seems to think he’d be the perfect standard-bearer should the effort materialize.

According to CNN, Manchin is motivated by the notion that “there’s a role for him as a national icon in the ‘fiscally responsible and socially compassionate’ middle, comparable with the role Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders plays for the progressive left.”

Of course, if Manchin decides to run, he’ll be disappointed to learn that while there are moderate voters, there is no mass electorate that pairs fiscal retrenchment with social liberalism. Instead, to borrow a typology from Christian Paz of Vox, moderate voters fall into three broad groups. There are “true........

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