CHARLESTON, W.Va.

Hundreds of demonstrators outraged with U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to a sweeping overhaul of U.S. election law marched through West Virginia’s capital city Monday evening.

The Rev. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, denounced the influential moderate Democratic senator and called for a diverse coalition of working people to apply pressure on Sen. Manchin, who recently opposed a $15 minimum wage and the price tag of President Biden’s initial $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

“West Virginia needs a real senator,” Rev. Barber thundered at a Charleston park in front of a crowd assembled for the “Moral March on Manchin.”

Then they marched a mile to Sen. Manchin’s office in Charleston, W.Va. Unable to meet with the senator — an aide told Rev. Barber that he was in Washington — leaders of the demonstration affixed a poster-sized protest letter to the front doors of the office building. Rally-goers took turns signing their names on it.

When Sen. Manchin’s aides offered comment cards to collect protesters’ grievances, Rev. Barber waved them away: “We don’t want to talk to the staff.”

An email to Sen. Manchin’s office about the protest was not immediately answered.

The protest was spurred by Sen. Manchin’s decision to oppose the For the People Act, a proposed landmark reform of U.S. election law that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March. The bill would expand voter registration and access, would end congressional gerrymandering, overhaul federal campaign finance laws and increase safeguards against foreign interference in elections, among other things.

Many Democratic senators want to eliminate the Senate filibuster to pass the bill, which would allow it to make it through the Senate with a simple 51-vote majority instead of the current requirement for a 60-vote supermajority.

But Sen. Manchin, a Democrat, opposes eliminating the 60-vote requirement. That has turned the West Virginia Democrat into a kingmaker in the evenly divided chamber.

“With our senator pretty much controlling this thing, we want to be here to say we’re not on the same page,” said Chuck Overstreet, a Charleston resident who joined the march.

The Poor People’s Campaign has decried the filibuster, which is seen by some activists as hamstringing efforts to pass an array of liberal-leaning bills.

Sen. Manchin said last week passing reform on a party-line vote risked further stoking partisan divides.

As a key senator in a divided chamber, Sen. Manchin has frustrated progressive Democrats with his reluctance to support several key agenda items.

Many people from neighboring states, including Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia, drove and rode on buses to make it to the protest. They held signs and charged Sen. Manchin with enabling voter suppression.

He supports a narrower piece of legislation known as HR4, or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that updates the federal Voting Rights Act to reinstate a requirement that new voting laws and legislative districts in certain states be subject to federal approval.

The Rev. Tyler C. Millner Sr., pastor of Morning Star Holy Church in Martinsville, Va., and founder of the annual January commemoration in Richmond honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that is now called Living the Dream, wrote a letter appealing to Sen. Manchin to support the voting rights legislation.

Rev. Millner wrote that America’s democracy is in peril from multiple blows, including from the Trump administration, the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the actions of a “stubborn and mean-spirited Republican Party” in the U.S. Senate and across the nation that “by their actions … undermine instead of defending and supporting our democratic principles and ideas.”

He wrote Sen. Manchin that “voting what is ‘right’ has to be greater, more honorable and a higher calling” than standing by a filibuster rule. He said maintaining the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rule is “not only wrong but unethical.”

“The ethic of our faith says ‘Do what is right,’ not what will increase your chances of receiving a positive vote in the next election,” Rev. Millner wrote.

He offered two Scripture citations for Sen. Manchin’s “enlightenment and instruction.”