Manchin’s expected top Senate foe will make ‘special announcement’ Thursday
Ryan King
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Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV) is set to make a “special announcement” Thursday amid rumors that he will compete for Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) seat.
Justice, who is term-limited as governor, has teased that he is considering a run, and Manchin has ratcheted up his criticism of the Biden administration as that decision nears. Manchin has been noncommittal about running for reelection.
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Justice’s announcement will take place at the Greenbrier Resort at 5 p.m. local time Thursday. So far, the top declared Republican contender is Rep. Alex Mooney (WV), who enjoys the backing of the Club for Growth, a free-market advocacy group.
Another speculated hopeful, Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, announced earlier this month that he will run for governor. Manchin bested Morrisey in his 2018 reelection bid by roughly 3 percentage points.
A poll commissioned by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican-aligned super PAC, found that Justice beat Manchin 52% to 42% and was the only hypothetical Republican aspirant to beat him. Justice was also the favorite among Republican primary candidates.
Manchin is a rare breakthrough for Democrats in deep Republican terrain, with former President Donald Trump winning West Virginia by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020. He has kept almost all of his options on the table, including a run for president in 2024.
“The bottom line is I will make my political decision in December, whatever it may be,” Manchin told CBS in March. “I’m not taking anything off the table. And I’m not putting anything on the table.”
Given the Democrats’ thin Senate majority, Manchin was often the linchpin vote who torpedoed multiple iterations of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. He reached a deal with Democrats on the roughly $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act last summer.
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Recently, Manchin soured on the Inflation Reduction Act, blasting Democrats over the implementation of it and even suggesting he would back an effort to repeal it.
“If the administration does not honor what they said they would do and continue to liberalize what we are supposed to invest in over the next 10 years, I will do everything in my power to prevent that from happening,” Manchin told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Monday. “And if they don’t change, then I would vote to repeal my own bill.”