On Friday, the West Virginia news radio network MetroNews reported that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin was considering challenging GOP Gov. Jim Justice in 2020. Manchin, who served as governor from 2005 until he was elected to the Senate in a 2010 special, very much didn’t rule anything out when asked.
Manchin instead took a shot at Justice, declaring, “All I’ll say is this, the state of West Virginia deserves and needs a full-time governor. I’ve held that position and I know what it takes.” Manchin seemed to be addressing rumors that Justice senior advisor Bray Cary is running much of the day-to-day operations in the state instead of the elected governor, adding, “you don’t have a surrogate running it for you. What I’m seeing now is not right.” The senator added, “We’ll see what happens in the future.”
Manchin may also have a more personal reason for wanting to go after Justice. Until fairly recently, the two were once on good terms. In 2016, back when Justice was running for governor as a Democrat, Manchin endorsed him in the three-way primary; Justice also hired several of Manchin's advisers for his campaign. After he won the general election, Justice named the senator’s wife, Gayle Manchin, as state secretary of education and the arts.
While Justice announced the next year that he was joining the GOP, he still seemed to like Manchin. A few weeks after his party switch, Justice told a group of lawmakers that he was supporting the senator’s 2018 re-election bid, arguing that “Joe has been a friend of mine and I'm going to tell you this as straight up as I can be: Joe Manchin is becoming a very key, integral part with Donald Trump.”
However, the Manchin-Justice alliance didn’t last. In March of 2018, Justice fired Gayle Manchin, a move that came after she defied his instructions and publicly called for him to veto legislation that would close her agency. (Justice signed the bill weeks later.) By August, the governor was appearing at Trump rallies and telling the crowd to elect Republican Senate nominee Patrick Morrisey. Manchin ended up pulling off a 50-46 win, though, and if he’s looking for a chance to get even with Justice, he may see the 2020 governor’s race as his chance to do it.
If Manchin does seek to get his old job back, it would likely be very good news for Democrats looking to retake the governorship, but extremely bad news for Senate Democrats. We’ll start with the first part first. Manchin was an incredibly popular governor during his tenure during the last decade, and he maintained much of his appeal in D.C.
While Manchin’s win last year was considerably closer than any of his past general election campaigns, but he was probably the only West Virginia Democrat who could have won the Senate race in a state Trump had carried 68-26 two years before. However, polling is very limited out of the Mountain State, so we don’t have a good sense for how popular Justice is. The most recent information we have is a Morning Consult survey taken during the final quarter of 2018 (a period that included the final weeks of Manchin’s re-election campaign) that gave the senator an underwater 43-44 approval rating, while Justice was in stronger shape at 45-38.
If Manchin was elected governor in 2020, Democrats could lose his Senate seat very quickly afterwards. While West Virginia’s current law would allow a Gov. Manchin to appoint a new Democratic senator (something he did in 2010 after legendary Sen. Robert Byrd died in office), Team Red likely wouldn’t allow that law to remain intact. In 2015, Manchin also considered running for governor again, and the GOP legislature began working on a bill that would have required a vacant Senate seat remain open until a special election could be held.
The legislation never became law, but there’s no reason to think Republicans wouldn’t try to revive it if Manchin did run this time. It’s also incredibly tough to see another Democrat winning a West Virginia Senate seat in this day and age, so that special would almost certainly give Republicans a pickup in the near future well before Manchin’s term ends in 2025.
Of course, it’s anyone’s guess if Manchin would will actually run. The senator has spent years waxing nostalgia about his time running the state, and he’s made it no secret that he thinks “Washington sucks.” He seemed very serious about coming home in 2015, and he even began staffing up his PAC and hiring the state party chair to lead it. However, he surprisingly announced that he would sit out the race and run for re-election to the Senate in 2018.
Still, Manchin doesn’t seem especially happy in the Senate. While he reiterated in January of 2018 that he’d seek re-election, the New York Times reported that in the days before that pronouncement, Senate Democrats were panicked that the senator was about to change his mind and leave them without a candidate mere days before the filing deadline. That nightmare situation didn’t happen, and Manchin said afterwards that he saw the role moderates had played in ending the brief government shutdown and realized “goddamn it, the place is much better than we give it credit for.” But with a much longer government shutdown now underway, he may be revising that view.
In any case, we could be guessing about Manchin’s plans for a while. MetroNews’ Hoppy Kercheval writes that the senator is “known to change from day to day or even hour to hour how he feels about running for Governor,” but the “idea keeps surfacing and the dynamism of the legislative session that just started in Charleston is far more appealing to him than the protracted partial shutdown that’s now gripping Washington.”
Right now, the only declared Democratic candidate for governor is Stephen Noble Smith, who used to lead a group of nonprofits that work to combat poverty, and Manchin will likely keep many other prospective contenders from entering while they wait to see what he does.