Former West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, who left the Democratic Party to become an Independent before retiring from the Senate last year, details a noticeably closer working relationship with Donald Trump than with Barack Obama in his new book, Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense, released this week.
Manchin writes that Trump treated him as an 'outsider' who was open to dialogue, and that he spoke to Trump more in the first two years of his presidency than he did to Obama during Obama's eight years. 'If you want to have influence with Donald Trump, you have to be the last person he talks to about a topic,' he wrote. He would jokingly ask that the president ensure he was the last person he called. 'He’d laugh, and we’d talk it out,' he said.
He recalled his 2018 election campaign in the wake of Trump's dominant 40-point win in the state. Trump told Manchin that he was being pressured to campaign against him and promised he wouldn't. Ultimately, Trump visited the state five times, and Manchin still came out on top.
Manchin was invited to the Oval Office to meet with Trump, where the president, in front of then-Vice President Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump, 'blurted to his other guests, I told you we couldn't beat him'.
On Obama, Manchin described a relationship that began over a coal deal in Illinois when Obama was still a senator and Manchin was West Virginia's governor, which later soured into disillusion with the Democratic Party. He said he invited Obama and Hillary Clinton to West Virginia to campaign during the 2008 cycle, but Obama declined, telling him, 'Let's be honest with each other — my demographics don't work well in your state.' He added that Obama's push for green initiatives and a 'war on coal' targeted fossil fuels and states like West Virginia, widening the gap between the party and working-class voters.
Manchin argues that the Democratic Party had grown dismissive of the working class, contributing to a seismic shift in West Virginia’s political alignment from Democratic to largely Republican. He says the shift began during Obama’s presidency as rural states felt overlooked and undervalued.
Fox News Digital reached out to Obama's office and the White House for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
The book's publication comes as Manchin reflects on a career that included a high-profile party switch and retirement, circumstances that underscored the broader realignment of working-class voters in states like West Virginia across the Trump era.
The dialogue surrounding Manchin's disclosures arrives amid ongoing national conversations about how parties connect with working-class voters and how relationships across the aisle influence governance, especially in states that have shifted away from Democratic roots in recent years.