Former Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) said Monday he plans to campaign for Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) this fall, putting the retired West Virginia centrist on the opposite side of a race Democrats need to win back a Senate majority. Manchin left the Democratic Party in 2024 and registered as an independent before leaving office.
“I’m backing whoever’s the best candidate right now,” Manchin said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday. “Susan Collins. I’m gonna go campaign for Susan Collins. There’s not a better person.”
Asked how Maine voters could consider replacing her, Manchin cast Collins as the last of her kind.
“You lose the Susan Collins … you’re losing the soul of the Senate,” he said. “[She’s] basically, a person you can talk to [who] wants to do the right thing all the time, okay? Now, everybody says, she doesn’t do this, doesn’t speak up. Susan is always in there, always in the trenches.”
Manchin now leads the Independent Leadership Council, which is working to elect independent candidates to Congress, and he told the hosts he is backing an independent Senate candidate in Montana.
Manchin said he still turns to a short list of senators when he needs to get something done across party lines.
“And when you need someone to work with, I call Susan, I call Lisa, I got Mark Warner, I got different people I can sit down with all the time and talk to,” he said, referring to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Warner, a Democrat from Virginia. “And those are the people I always did [talk to]. And I’m going to do everything I can to help them.”
He described Murkowski and Collins as “independent, free-thinking Republicans.”
Collins will face Democrat Troy Jackson, the former Maine Senate president, in November. Jackson became the nominee at a July convention in Bangor after Graham Platner, winner of the June primary, ended his campaign.
Pressed on whether he would go further and endorse Republicans elsewhere, Manchin again said it was about the person and not their party.
The topic turned to the Michigan Senate race.
“No, I haven’t endorsed anybody,” he said, then added that former Rep. Mike Rogers—the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan—is “a personal friend.”
Asked whether he was comfortable with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed winning that seat, Manchin said he was not.
“Well, no,” Manchin said. “I do support Mike Rogers. I think Mike Rogers is a good person. I think he’ll do a great job.”
Manchin spent much of the interview criticizing his former party for failing to define what it stands for, pointing to the rise within the party of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“The Democrats … can’t basically set the baseline of what it takes to be a Democrat or be in a political party, if the party can’t basically say what their baseline is,” he said. ”We want strong borders. We want an immigration system that works.”
He argued that low-turnout primaries in both parties are producing candidates from the edges, and that closed primaries in 17 states lock out the independent voters both sides are courting for November.
“They design low turnouts that want to control the primaries,” Manchin said. “You have low turnout … and when you have a low turnout, you can control who gets elected. Because now you’re getting the far right and far left.”
Most of the interview was devoted to artificial intelligence, with Manchin calling on President Donald Trump to sign an executive order blocking AI companies from going public until Congress passes safety legislation.
Neither Collins’s campaign nor Jackson’s campaign responded to a request for comment from The Epoch Times by publication time.
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