There’s a Fox News piece out about how Joe Manchin, who is up for re-election and almost certainly will lose his Senate seat next fall to a Republican in deep-red West Virginia, is a potential third-party candidate for president instead…

Democrats on Capitol Hill are growing increasingly concerned that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., may launch a third party presidential campaign in 2024, potentially tanking President Biden’s chances of re-election.

The danger of a potential Manchin presidential run is twofold for Democrats, in that they cannot afford to have a spoiler siphon votes away from Biden, and they also have no reliable candidate to prevent Manchin’s Senate seat from falling to Republicans.

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said he spoke with Manchin about the issue this spring, but received a noncommittal response from the West Virginia senator.

“I have advised him against it. I think it would be a terrible idea,” Hickenlooper told Politico. “It would help Donald Trump.”

The thing is, that’s the point.

Because what Hickenlooper and his fellow leftist politicians who now have a stranglehold on the Democrat Party are too arrogant to understand is how utterly disgusted the American public is with them.

The cultural issues which are front and center with this atrocious Pride Month death march they’ve decided to drag the country through, and the nonstop screeching about race while the public clearly has had it with the entire woke project, are a slow-rolling disaster for the Left. But they’re so tightly wrapped inside their own little bubble that they simply don’t know what time it is.

The Democrats are so off the rails that Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who is a through-and-through leftist with abjectly crazy positions on things like climate change, isn’t even good enough for them because he dares to question the woke narrative on a few items. They’re busily attempting to freeze RFK Junior out of the Democrat primaries, and the Democrat establishment won’t push back against Joe Biden when he says he won’t do any primary debates.

Check out how utterly ridiculous this is…

.@MollyJongFast: “[Dr. Hotez] should absolutely not [debate @RobertKennedyJr]. Dr. Hotez … has devoted himself to science. He’s a pediatrician, he’s an incredibly good man … RFK Jr. Is a crank & an anti-vaxxer & we all know why these very wealthy tech bros are pumping him up” pic.twitter.com/q6eFqeuoJz

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 19, 2023

That was Vanity Fair propagandist Molly Jong-Fast not even talking about the prospect of a Biden-Kennedy Democrat primary debate but a proxy debate between RFK Junior and the medical-industrial complex shill Dr. Peter Hotez, who has propagandized for the non-vaccine COVID vaccine which made RFK Junior relevant in the first place.

She’s the one who went there in declaring it a proxy fight. But that’s the part where she isn’t actually wrong.

Because it’s Democrat establishment types like Molly Jong-Fast, the people who have turned that party away from the (private sector and industrial) unions and working-class folks it used to represent and who are doing everything they can to repurpose it as a Cultural Revolution-style political conspiracy to stamp out independent thought and personal initiative, who are forcing RFK Junior out of the Democrat Party.

They’re the ones decrying any obligation for Biden to debate within the party.

And they know they can get away with it, because Biden was all but annihilated in each and every one of the Democrat primary debates in the 2000 cycle and they were able to foist him on America anyway.

And they managed that through ballot harvesting and other heretofore illegitimate means, plus an all-out demonization of Trump.

Now – you could change Trump out as the GOP nominee for, say, Ron DeSantis, and perhaps that might assuage fears that Jong-Fast’s characterization of Trump as unelectable could be true. But as we know they’ll demonize DeSantis in similar ways to what they’ve done with Trump. Perhaps DeSantis comes with less baggage and it would be more work to slime him, but they don’t care – look at the whole cloth they turned into the Trump-Russia hoax, after all.

The problem they have is that Trump is now leading Biden by six points in a couple of new polls. So the problem of unelectability is starting to go both ways now.

And screwing RFK Junior over in the primary might well make lots of Democrats who don’t like this recent turn of their party into this hyper-woke, sex-pervert-driven, neocommunist cabal anxious to pander to campus leftists and aging feminists like Molly Jong-Fast with houses full of cats ready to punish their own party.

On the Right, we see a lot of angst over the fact that so many traditionally loyal Republican voters have had it with the party’s establishment and they’ve thrown in with Trump even, perhaps, past his sell-by date because they’re certainly not done punishing the party’s lousy elite. That same sentiment exists on the Left, too.

The difference is that the Democrat political establishment is even more unprincipled than that of the GOP. They’ll pander to anyone, take any position and engage in any dirty trick in order to gain and hold power. So while they used to be Clintonite New Democrats hewing to the center, now they’re busily co-opting Bernie Sanders and quoting Robin DiAngelo. And their voters who have been casting about looking for some sort of populist revival on their own side are a lot more frustrated than even the Trumpiest Trumpers.

So there’s a real fear that RFK Junior could become a thing. In fact, but for the vocal infirmity that he has which makes him sound like Katherine Hepburn with COPD, he might actually be giving Biden a run for his money in current polls, which would be highly injurious to the preferred electoral narrative of the Molly Jong-Fasts of the world.

And what that tells you is how badly the Democrats need a reset – the kind of reset you only get when you’ve been fully repudiated and have to spend some time in the political wilderness.

So if RFK Junior realizes he’s going up against a rigged primary process and decides to run a third-party race, he might just bring about that reset. From his perspective it might be a nice piece of revenge against the political and governmental elite seeing as though he believes it was the CIA who killed both his uncle and his father.

And from Manchin’s perspective, after having been lied to and made into a chump so many times by Chuck Schumer and the Democrats’ Senate leadership, running as a third party candidate and forcing the Democrats’ needed reset would be one last final service to party and country he wouldn’t be appreciated for until later.

The Fox News piece says Manchin isn’t much moved by the John Hickenloopers and Tim Kaines browbeating him about a third-party run (maybe, just maybe, he’s of the opinion that these guys have caused him nothing but trouble with his own constituents and he’s had enough)…

Nevertheless, Manchin has refused to rule out the possibility in interviews as well as in conversations with fellow Democrats.

“Then how did Perot get Bill Clinton elected?” Manchin asked in an interview with Politico when confronted with the assumption that he would serve as a spoiler.

“Everybody’s getting so worked up and scared to death, and we’re a year and a half away,” he added. “Is there any alternative? Is there anything that we can do to bring both the Democrat and Republican Party back to centrist policy?”

Manchin last refused to rule out the move in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” earlier in June. Host Shannon Bream grilled Manchin on reports that he may align with the group “No Labels” to fund a campaign.

“Not ruling anything in, not ruling anything out,” Manchin replied.

You put a Democrat into the 2024 race as a third-party candidate, and it creates a serious problem for their establishment. Whether it’s a Manchin who can siphon off some private sector union types or rural/exurban centrists in a Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Georgia, or an RFK Junior who splits off voters on the left, either one could tip multiple swing states easily behind Trump or DeSantis or whoever else would be the GOP nominee.

And other the long haul, it would do a lot of good for the Democrat Party. As currently constituted, all it’s capable of is ruin. It badly needs a reset before it takes down the whole country.