Manchin's Independent Bet Splits the Press Before It Splits Voters

Roughly 40 people gathered last Thursday at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a property famous for the Cold War bunker built to shelter Congress in a nuclear strike. They weren't there for the bunker tour. Joe Manchin, 78 and a year and a half removed from the Senate, brought together donors, political reform advocates and eight independent congressional candidates to launch the Independent Leadership Council, an effort he's running with his daughter Heather to recruit and fund candidates who refuse to caucus with either party.

Three outlets covered the retreat within days of each other. Read them side by side and you'd struggle to guess they're describing the same gathering.

What Manchin Actually Announced

The mechanics are straightforward, according to NPR's report, carried by KPBS. The Independent Leadership Council merges Heather Manchin's group, Americans Together, with the Independent Center, a nonprofit led by former FreedomWorks president Adam Brandon and former Forbes Media chief impact officer Seth Cohen. Candidates who attended, including California Rep. Kevin Kiley — a former Republican now running for reelection as an independent — signed what Manchin called a "Declaration of Independents," pledging not to caucus with Democrats or Republicans if elected.

Brandon told NPR the group already has "over eight figures in commitments" from donors. CNN's account, distributed through its wire service and republished by ABC17NEWS, adds that the roster includes Seth Bodnar in Montana, Todd Achilles in Idaho and Michael Bridgford in Iowa, with an eye on races in Alaska and Washington state too. Both outlets note the timing: a Gallup poll from earlier this year found 45% of Americans now identify as independents, up from 39% a decade ago.

Two Reporters, Two Different Stories

NPR's piece reads like access journalism in the best sense — its reporter was inside the room, quoting Kiley's argument that House rules force independents to caucus with a party just to sit on a committee, and Brandon's Field of Dreams framing ("if you build it, they will come"). The tone throughout treats the retreat's premise, that voters are hungry for a real alternative, as more or less self-evident.

Newsweek's coverage opens from the same premise, dueling party favorability polls both underwater, but pivots hard into skepticism once it reaches actual political scientists. Jacob Neiheisel of the University at Buffalo told Newsweek that support for independents "tends to evaporate when people are in the voting booth," and that America's first-past-the-post, single-member-district system is simply "tailored to a two-party solution." Jared McDonald of the University of Mary Washington went further, telling Newsweek that "efforts like Manchin's can never achieve the lofty goals he is proposing" because winning candidates still need a party coalition to pass legislation once they arrive in Washington. Newsweek also does something neither NPR nor CNN does: it names the precedent. No Labels, the centrist group Manchin flirted with running for president under in 2024, folded its own White House effort after failing to recruit a credible ticket. Newsweek treats that history as a live warning; NPR and CNN barely mention it.

The Spoiler Question the Retreat Didn't Answer

Here's what gets lost when each outlet tells its half of the story separately: whether the Independent Leadership Council is actually "outside the two-party system," as Heather Manchin describes it, or functions as a de facto ally of one party in specific races.

CNN's report is the one that supplies the evidence for that question, almost in passing. In Nebraska, Democratic Senate nominee Cindy Burbank dropped out of her race to clear the field for independent Dan Osborn against Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. In Alaska, independent Bill Hill's position improved after his most serious Democratic rival endorsed him instead of running. In Montana, by contrast, Democratic nominee Alani Bankhead has refused to step aside for independent Seth Bodnar, creating a three-way race that a recent Tavern Research poll shows splitting the anti-Republican vote roughly down the middle. Manchin's own language, that a handful of unaligned lawmakers could "bring people to their knees" in a closely divided Congress, is a theory about leverage, not neutrality. None of the three stories puts these facts in one place and asks the obvious follow-up: if Democratic candidates are already standing down to make room for these independents, is "independent" doing the work Manchin says it is, or is it a rebrand of tactical vote consolidation against Republicans in specific, winnable districts?

Manchin's own comments point to where this is headed. He told CNN he's troubled by democratic socialists winning primaries in closed party contests, citing this summer's New York mayoral primary that lifted Zohran Mamdani as an example of a party base "hijacking the system." That's a critique of Democrats specifically, from a man positioning his project as equally skeptical of both parties.

What to Watch

The council says it's backing a small number of candidates deliberately, not fielding fifty. Whether that discipline produces even one winner will start to show in Alaska's all-party primary on August 18, months before the wider verdict lands on November 3. If Osborn, Bodnar, Kiley or Hill actually wins, the "pilot experiment" framing both NPR and CNN use will look prescient. If none does, Newsweek's political scientists will have the receipts. Either way, the retreat produced three good-faith accounts of the same afternoon that can't agree on the one thing that matters most: whether this is different from every failed centrist project before it, or just a better-funded rerun.

Sources & Further Reading

• Inside Joe Manchin's new quest to elect more Independents to Congress — NPR / KPBS
• Joe Manchin reenters the political orbit with a new independent experiment — CNN (via ABC17NEWS)
• Americans Are Fed Up With Both Parties—Could Joe Manchin Have the Answer? — Newsweek