In Long-Shot Challenge to Biden, Dean Phillips Goes Where Few Democrats Dare

To hear Dean Phillips tell it, he’s trying to do the Democratic Party a favor. The Minnesota congressman says he is running against his party’s incumbent president to give it a better shot at beating Donald Trump.

“They know that Joe Biden is one of the least well-positioned Democrats to take on this mission,” Phillips said of his colleagues in Congress and the party establishment, in an interview in the bare-bones multipurpose room of a senior center here. “Coronating incumbents, even when they are not electable, even when the country says they don’t want it—particularly in light of the consequence of a Donald Trump re-election—it’s tragic, and that’s why somebody has to do something.”

While most of the attention paid to the New Hampshire primary has focused on the Republican race—which on Sunday continued to coalesce around Trump when Ron DeSantis suspended his campaign—Phillips’s long-shot campaign highlights the distinct but no-less-serious predicament facing the Democrats. The party, Phillips says, is sleepwalking into disaster by renominating the oldest and by some measures most unpopular incumbent in history. 

Yet his colleagues’ response to this clarion call hasn’t exactly been one of gratitude, and he has struggled to get the attention of voters. He hopes to change that in Tuesday’s New Hampshire presidential primary, when he will be on the ballot and President Biden will not.