Manning said she would not run as an independent should her primary bid fail. On June 26, 2018, Manning finished second among eight Democrats vying for their party's U.S. Senate nomination in Maryland's primary election. Manning received 5.8% of the votes. Incumbent Ben Cardin won renomination with 80.4% of the votes cast. Shortly after the polls closed, Manning posted a statement on her campaign website. "Over the past several months," she wrote, "it has become clear that my experiences have taken an enormous toll on my physical and emotional health. I stepped back from campaigning to prioritize my own well-being." She thanked "the more than one thousand individual donors who generously contributed to our campaign," and "our team of hundreds of volunteers." But, she added, "after spending hours and hours knocking on doors and making phone calls, I'm convinced that the change people truly need goes beyond what our corrupt two-party system is willing to offer." Interactions with far-right social media figures On January 20, 2018, Manning attended "A Night for Freedom" hosted by far-right social media personality Mike Cernovich at the nightclub FREQ in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. The party was billed, in Cernovich's words, as a "gathering of patriots and political dissidents who are bored with mainstream political events", and included right-wing figures such as Gavin McInnes, James O'Keefe, Lucian Wintrich, and Jack Posobiec. According to The Washington Post, Manning's attendance infuriated the far-left. "What followed," The Post reported, "was an overheated Internet tug-of-war between opposite sides of the political spectrum, each accusing the other of co-opting Manning, while her intentions were relentlessly picked apart." Manning afterward stated that she was acting as a double agent, infiltrating the alt-right to gather information and insight about alt-right rally plans. It later emerged this was not the first time she had interacted with those identified as being on the alt-right. In December 2017, after first getting in touch with Cassandra Fairbanks (an admirer and writer for the right-wing website The Gateway Pundit), Manning participated with Fairbanks, Posobiec, Wintrich, and others in Escape the Room DC, and spent an evening drinking and playing Cards Against Humanity at Wintrich's apartment with him, Fairbanks, and others. Speaking to The Daily Beast after the revelations about her attendance at "A Night for Freedom" Manning claimed that she had only attended in an attempt to gain information on their movement stating, "I viewed this as an