Former U.S. Senator Joe Manchin visited USC to speak with the director of the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future (CPF), Bob Shrum, to discuss his new memoir, “Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense.”
Manchin spoke to an audience of students and attendees at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute inside Verna and Peter Dauterive Hall on Thursday afternoon, where students were handed free copies of his book to be signed after the discussion.
The former senator was raised in a small, blue-collar town, where he said he learned the value of responsibility. “I was always taught that your words have meaning and your actions will be held accountable for,” Manchin said.
Manchin explained how he climbed the ranks in the political world from being a House of Delegates member, state senator, and eventually governor. Manchin said his goal was to pursue public service, not self-service like some of his competitors.
Representing West Virginia as a Democratic senator from 2010 to 2025, Manchin was long described as being a conservative-leaning Democrat. He served as governor of West Virginia from 2005 to 2010 before becoming a senator. Simultaneously, Manchin was the chair of the Democratic Governors Association and the Southern Governors Association. While Manchin is now retired, he explained he remains committed to bipartisanship.
“One side is not always right. One side’s not always wrong…I have friends who are Democrats and friends who are Republicans,” Manchin said. “They have ideas of how to fix the same problems we’ve identified, and I need their input. I don’t think one side has all the answers to fix it by themselves.”
Following his term in the Senate, Manchin declared himself an Independent in 2024, switching his affiliation from the Democratic Party. Manchin has often criticized both parties throughout his career in office. He feels the system was never designed for one party. Rather, he said it’s more about checks and balances and a representative form of democracy. “And that’s just not who we are as people, what you’re seeing today, and we have to bring it together,” Manchin said.
“It’s horrific what happened to Charlie Kirk and his family and his children,” Manchin said. “There’s no place for that type of violence in the political process. In this type of country, we can’t have that.”
According to Manchin, as a nation, you expect the people that you elect to represent you. If they’re out spewing “hatred and horrible dialect,” then people are going to look and say, “well, I guess if it’s okay for them to do, I can do it too,” Manchin explained.
“This just gets people further apart. We can’t get any further apart. We’ve got to bring them back,” Manchin said.
This division is why the CPF brought Manchin to speak with students, according to Channing Mack, a CPF coordinator and political science student with an emphasis in pre-law.
“I feel like it’s what we need now, especially in the wake of the political violence, and especially the political violence that happened on a college campus, we campus, really need these just civil events from that, like, I would say, brings together both sides and just humanizes each other,” Mack said.
In an interview with CNN, he claimed Democrats are now too worried about social issues, such as transgender rights, while also arguing that Republicans do not take enough responsibility for the national debt.
Alex Chen, a freshman Business Administration student at USC, admits to not being well-versed in politics but found the experience of learning about Manchin’s role and experiences as a senator interesting. He finds it understandable that Manchin has become more independent due to the increasing extremism in both major political parties.
“I’ve also noticed that the last few years, the Democratic and Republican parties have been getting really extreme in their ideas,” Chen said. “It’s kind of been more clashing between them, rather than, like, working together.”
“The system was never designed for one party only making all the rules, the one person always being who’s right? It’s not the way. It’s checks and balances. It’s what we call a representative form of democracy,” Manchin said.