He’s back. Joe Manchin, the 78-year-old political escape artist who spent decades playing both sides of the aisle, is refusing to fade into a quiet retirement. A year and a half after walking away from a Senate he deemed hopelessly broken, the West Virginian is launching a new venture: the Independent Leadership Council. It is not a new political party. Don’t call it that. Instead, it is a matchmaking service for political orphans, designed to recruit and fund independent candidates who might just hold the balance of power in a razor-thin Congress.
Manchin kicked off the project in West Virginia, gathering a ragtag band of political outsiders. The guest list was telling. You had California Representative Kevin Kiley, a former Republican running as an independent. There was Seth Bodnar, aiming for a Senate seat in Montana, and Todd Achilles, eyeing Idaho. Michael Bridgford came from Iowa. They are targeting Alaska and Washington next. It is a calculated gamble.
The timing is no accident. Voters are exhausted. A recent Gallup poll shows a record 45 percent of American adults now identify as independents. The major parties are bleeding loyalty, and the Manchins smell opportunity. In a closely divided Capitol, even a single independent senator can hold the entire government hostage. Manchin knows this game well. He played it for years.
“It doesn’t take too many,” Manchin muttered, explaining how a tiny faction can force partisan zealots to their knees. If his group backs a candidate, they will do more than just write checks. They will show up. They will campaign, raise cash, and build ground operations. His daughter, former pharmaceutical executive Heather Manchin, is co-leading the charge. She calls it a pilot experiment. If it works, she warns, the floodgates will open.
They aren’t doing this alone. Conservative operative Adam Brandon, formerly of FreedomWorks, and Seth Cohen, a voting rights advocate and former Forbes executive, are on board as advisers. This is Manchin’s biggest play since he walked out of the Senate in January 2025. He spent his final months there as an independent, finally shedding the Democratic label after years of friction.
Since leaving office, he has written a book and promoted his daughter’s centrist group, “Americans Together.” He still hangs around Washington. At a recent conservative think tank event, his former Republican colleague Rob Portman joked that nobody knows what party Manchin belongs to anymore. Manchin laughed it off. But the humor masks a deeper bitterness. He looks at the current Senate and sees a desert. No deal-makers. No backroom handshakes. Just noise.
He blames the system. Closed primaries, he argues, allow extremists to hijack elections. He points to democratic socialists winning in New York as proof. When asked about John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has been bucking his own party lately, Manchin shrugged. Fetterman has to do what makes him comfortable, Manchin said, though he noted the Pennsylvanian still backs “hardcore” Democratic policies that Manchin always hated.
Do not expect Manchin to run again. He flirted with a presidential bid under the No Labels banner but insists those days are gone. Forty-plus years in the arena is enough. Now, he wants to pull the strings from the sidelines.
The independent path is brutal. Ballot access is a nightmare. Fundraising is worse. In Montana, Bodnar is stuck in a three-way mess because the Democratic nominee refuses to drop out. But elsewhere, the strategy is working. In Nebraska, the Democrat stepped aside to give independent Dan Osborn a clean shot at Republican Pete Ricketts. In Alaska, independent Bill Hill got a massive boost when his Democratic rival quit and endorsed him.
Hill is a commercial fisherman and former school superintendent. He supports abortion rights but loves his guns. He does not fit a mold. Most Alaskans do not. That is the demographic Manchin is betting on. It is a long shot, but in a broken system, sometimes the long shots are the only ones worth watching.
