The Democratic congressman Dean Phillips, who is challenging the incumbent president, Joe Biden, will keep running his long-shot bid for the White House through the summer after he’s had more time to introduce himself to voters across the US.
Phillips initially planned to run in a few states for his party’s presidential nomination, focusing especially on the crucial early-voting state of New Hampshire, which was seen as a trial balloon for his candidacy. But now, Phillips told the Guardian in an interview, he is aiming for a much longer campaign.
By the summer, Phillips wants to compare head-to-head polling between him and the former president Donald Trump, and Trump and Biden. If Biden fares better in the matchup, Phillips would support him. If Phillips fares better, he believes Biden should throw his support toward the congressman.
“Those are my intentions, and I think those should be the intentions of every Democrat. Let’s find the candidate best positioned and most likely to win,” Phillips said.
Phillips’s bullishness about his odds – and his strong belief that Biden will not win against Trump again – have kept his campaign in motion. The congressman, buoyed up by a personal fortune from his family’s distilling company and a gelato brand, hasn’t been deterred by the Democratic machine backing Biden. So far, Phillips has been his own main supporter, injecting $4m into his own campaign.
As the New Hampshire primary nears next month, Phillips is feeling good about his chances there. Biden isn’t on the ballot in the state because national Democrats altered their calendar to put more diverse states earlier in the primary process, though the president’s supporters will mount a write-in campaign. That gives Phillips a leg up.
The state offers the “lowest cost, highest probability opportunity to surprise people and to demonstrate my campaign”, he said.
Since Phillips launched his campaign in October, after months of trying to goad more prominent Democrats to challenge the sitting president, he’s been met with a chorus of simple questions about who he is and why he’s doing this.
His answer is simple: “Because Joe Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump.”
Phillips’s presence in the race doesn’t really change that fact at this point – polls in New Hampshire show him far behind Biden. Recent polls back up his assertion, though, that the Democratic president isn’t going into the election year strong. Neither Biden nor Trump are well liked by the electorate, despite the seeming inevitability of the repeat matchup.
“You can’t win a national election with 33% approval numbers,” Phillips said, referring to a recent Pew Research Center survey on Biden’s job rating. “And I don’t understand why I’m the only one out of 250-some Democrats in Congress to simply say the quiet part out loud: he cannot win the next election.”
On policy, the two Democrats don’t widely differ. Phillips’s campaign isn’t an insurgent progressive campaign designed to move the centrist president further left. The main difference is a visual one – Phillips is much younger than Biden and Trump. He’s called for a new generation to lead the country forward.
In that sense, though, his campaign draws attention to one of Biden’s weakest points, though Phillips argues the age differences are “pretty obvious” and not something he’s actively pointed out. “Neither of us can change our ages or stages of life.”
By running a campaign against Biden, some Democrats fear Phillips is emphasizing the president’s flaws during a vulnerable time, ultimately further hurting Democrats’ ability to beat Trump in 2024. Phillips finds this notion “absurd”, saying that his presence should help Biden if it gets the president to come out and campaign or debate, to show himself to the voters more.
While Biden’s poor polling animated Phillips’s campaign, the congressman has worked to fill in some of the details about who he’d be as a president. His political career has been short: three terms in Congress after flipping a longtime GOP seat in suburban Minnesota. He’s keen on pragmatic, bipartisan politics.
As of now, the economy and affordability have risen as a primary focus for him, with plans to address the rising costs of healthcare, housing, education and daily expenses forthcoming, he said.
He’s also changed his mind on one big issue after hearing “such horrifying, heartbreaking stories” from people since taking office: he now supports Medicare for All, as opposed to just a public option. He thinks it’s an issue on which Republicans and Democrats could work together.
On the Israel-Hamas war, perhaps Biden’s weakest point within his own party at the moment, Phillips doesn’t track too far off from Biden. He is a “passionate supporter of the state of Israel” who believes the country has a right to defend itself and that the US and its allies should unify to support Israel. He also has an “equal affection for Palestinians” and believes they deserve self-determination and a state. He has argued for the release of hostages and a concurrent ceasefire.
“I intend to be the first Jewish American president in our history,” he said. “And I want to be the one that signs documents that help found the Palestinian state for the first time because we cannot continue to allow this cycle of bloodshed and misery and destruction to occur any longer.”
To get anywhere near the presidency, Phillips would need to overcome a Democratic party already working hard to re-elect its incumbent president. Some states, such as Florida and North Carolina, have already decided not to hold primaries for president.
The structural odds bother Phillips, who sees them as anti-democratic. The political culture on both sides forces people to stay in line rather than challenge the status quo if they want to keep their careers in elected office, he said. He knows his congressional career is done because of his presidential run – he’s not running for his seat in Minnesota again. And if he loses, he presumes his political career is over too. It will be worth it to him to try to keep Trump out of the White House, he said.
“We need more people willing to torpedo their careers in Congress like I did, to ensure that we do not torpedo the entire country,” he said.
Given the president’s age, though, staying in the race longer could be a hedge in case something were to happen to Biden. In that instance, it’s still tough to see how Phillips would be the best man for the job, though he’d be the only mainstream Democrat who had the primary calendar on his side.
Still, he hopes more Democrats will jump in the presidential race. “The water is warm. Come on in. That’s what I’ve been asking for for many, many months,” Phillips said. “It gets to a point where doing so gets harder and harder because of state ballot access. Already, I think 15 states are too late to get on the ballot. So yes, I wish that would have happened months ago.”
