Dean Phillips launched his long-shot Democratic primary bid saying he wanted to “strengthen” President Joe Biden. He talked about not wanting to “demean” or “diminish” the president. He said he wanted to be a mainstream voice, making a broad appeal for a new generation wanting change.
But on his largely self-funded swing last week through New Hampshire, the Minnesota congressman was raising doubts about Biden’s physical capacity and calling the president a threat to democracy in attacks that right-wing media and Donald Trump all feed on, while Phillips zigzagged to the left away from his own voting record.
Phillips says he has earnestly been shocked by what he says is Biden’s “deluded” threat to democracy by running at the risk of losing, how much he now believes the president is not up to campaigning and the way the Democratic establishment he was proud to be a part of is working against the people.
“I’m discovering things that are horrifying me and I’m saying things that are horrifying me,” Phillips told CNN as he sat in a side office in the massive campaign headquarters he opened Saturday on the main stretch in Manchester. “It’s true. It’s not what I intended.”
With a good poll for Biden these days being one in which he is over 40%, Phillips sees himself as like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” who makes the rest angry by being the only one brave enough to point out problems anyone can see.
But as Phillips has taken to playing Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” at events and asserting, “I am a serious candidate,” his own campaign continues to struggle with just over 40 days before the New Hampshire primary. Florida and North Carolina Democrats canceled their primaries rather than giving him a chance to be on the ballot (he says he is filing lawsuits). Steve Schmidt, the well-known GOP operative who helped him launch the campaign, has departed in part over not wanting Phillips to attack Biden if there was no chance of beating him. And Schmidt has decided that the super PAC he started to boost Phillips’ campaign will now support candidates outside of the White House race.
As Phillips makes his way around New Hampshire to rooms of dozens at most, staffers are churning so much that one wrote in a text last week, “I got hired and immediately there were ten fires and somehow each day is the same.”
Meanwhile, the co-founder of the moderate No Labels-backed Problem Solvers Caucus is now campaigning on “Medicare for All” – though he will not back the bill in Congress and disagrees with some of the proposal’s core provisions.
To Biden’s advisers, Phillips being the only alternative to show for all the voter doubts and media angst about the president is proof once again that support for him is deeper and wider than data can measure or savvy insiders want to admit.
To others – including Democratic leaders who just months ago were privately saying they wished Biden would not run and are now hosting fundraisers for him – this self-funded “journey” of self-discovery by Phillips is a selfish exercise when Biden and the country feel so precarious.
“Other Democrats that are now vocalizing and saying these incredibly unhelpful kind of things – why? What’s your goal? Are you trying to diminish the president? Are you trying to strengthen Trump?” said Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, an unabashed Biden backer. “It’s much easier and much less effort to just write a check for Trump.”
Phillips blames Biden’s decision not to engage in a campaign against him for why he no longer sees himself as strengthening the president.
“I think his weakness predated my entrance,” Phillips said. “By exposing him now, is that not a service to the Democratic Party? Because he’s going to be exposed on a much more difficult stage in a number of months if he becomes the nominee.”
Phillips contends Biden would “absolutely not” be capable of the kind of campaigning that he is doing, while also suggesting the president is somehow behind last week’s decisions by the Florida and North Carolina state Democratic parties to nix their primaries and automatically award their delegates to Biden.
“Either he’s aware of it and somehow behind it – or his team – or he’s not even aware. And either way, I’m disgusted,” Phillips said.
Phillips also insists there must be polls the Biden team have taken that show how well he is doing against the president.
T.J. Ducklo, the Biden campaign’s senior adviser for communications, kept his answers to Phillips short.
On whether Biden and top advisers are concerned about the political impact if Phillips ends up drawing sizable support in New Hampshire, where Phillips is staging what he hopes will start the process of humiliating Biden into quitting the race, like Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1968: “No,” said Ducklo.
On whether they are concerned about damage from Phillips’ comments about Biden’s being old and a purported threat to democracy: “We are not.”
And as for Phillips’ allegation of suppressing polls: “Nope.”
A shifting agenda from a mash-up campaign
In South Carolina a few days before Thanksgiving, the crowd was filled with people offered $50 gift cards to stay for the entirety of Phillips’ speech. In New Hampshire last week, two people who said they liked what they heard from him said they had never heard of him before getting a mass text an hour before he started. After saying he would not do his own polling, Phillips is now referring to data from focus groups organized by a new super PAC formed for him by a man whose main job is running a company trying to make human embryos out of stem cells. Phillips started early with TV ads but has been largely off the air for weeks. Several senior staff remain based in New York City.
He travels with private security guards who wear earpieces and narrate his movements in and out of small events, though one also took some time to work his way through a cheese plate as the candidate spoke to reporters at a house party in Amherst, New Hampshire, last week.
After Schmidt’s departure, the former presidential campaign managers of both Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and entrepreneur Andrew Yang joined as senior advisers, bringing with them a mash-up of campaign alums sprinkled with a few Phillips staffers from Minnesota.
Phillips says his campaign team presages the “team of rivals” administration he wants of the presidency he now envisions – and says the security is in response to threats that he has gotten, saying that the fact that his campaign’s two greatest expenses are ballot access and security is a demonstration of how warped American politics has become.
Policy changes have come, too. He attacks Biden for not doing more to address affordability and for using the term “Bidenomics,” but he says he stands by his votes for the bills in Biden’s economic agenda – explaining that now he believes “those were not designed to lower prices.” The ranking member on the Middle East subcommittee, he now says there should be an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but only once all the hostages are released, and that Biden should have been talking every day about the American citizens being held. At a dispensary just over the Maine border, Phillips said Biden should address the marijuana laws – and smoke a joint himself – but seemed unfamiliar with Biden’s 2022 pardons of people with federal possession convictions and starting the process of rescheduling the drug.
Years before running for Congress, Phillips was the chairman of the board of a healthcare nonprofit later investigated for denying care to people with unpaid medical bills in a practice that started under his tenure. Phillips says he was unaware, but that his time on the board was “my first discovery of how just woefully broken the model was.”
Phillips says he was about to back Medicare for All before announcing this campaign and points to a May meeting with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to discuss the matter. He says now he still does not support ending private insurance companies and he envisions a system parallel to the public education system, where every person in America has access to baseline care.
He says his evolution on the topic tracks with some clearly plotted points, including learning more about the nonprofit’s operation; his older daughter’s successful fight against non-Hodgkin lymphoma; saying he could not afford to pay health care for employees at the coffee shops he used to own; and five years of hard learning in Congress. He denies that his embrace of Medicare for All or the Sanders staple of free college tuition are convenient conversions for a candidate looking for attention and support.
Likewise, Phillips says, for his turn to universal basic income, the policy that was the core of Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign, which he says his eyes have now been opened to as a way of grappling with how artificial intelligence is going to change the economy. (Yang told CNN he supports Phillips as “our best chance to upgrade the Democratic nominee and decrease the odds of a Trump victory in ‘24,” but when asked whether the congressman ever mentioned universal basic income when they met in Washington last year, he said, “We bonded more on campaign finance reform.”)
“Am I in a position where now that I learn the truth, I’m going to share that truth? Of course,” Phillips said. “If we’re judging leaders on how consistent they are on their policy propositions and not how consistent they are on their principles, then we’re in big, big trouble. And of course, I’m 54 years old. I’m not 81 years old. I am still discovering.”
Dreaming of chasing Biden out like LBJ in 1968
Phillips initially said he would assess his campaign by the Super Tuesday primaries in March. Now he talks about June, nursing the hopeful fantasy that he will humiliate Biden out of the race like Eugene McCarthy did to Johnson after nearly winning the New Hampshire primary in 1968.
Because the primaries are now stacked much earlier in the calendar, if Biden did somehow drop out, the nomination would be decided by a couple of hundred convention delegates, roughly along the lines of the process that gave Hubert Humphrey the nomination that year despite his not having won a single primary (key historical factor: Robert F. Kennedy, who entered the race days after the New Hampshire primary, did not get the nomination because he was assassinated).
Both McCarthy and Humphrey, Phillips has started pointing out, were fellow Minnesotans.
Internally, advisers have set 42% in New Hampshire – what McCarthy got – as a benchmark for success. As he is not on the Nevada ballot and plans to skip South Carolina, he will go straight to campaigning in Michigan.
Biden will not be on the ballot in New Hampshire, due to the state refusing to comply with his directed reordering of the Democratic National Committee’s primary calendar. Because of that, the primary will not award delegates as normal.
But a group of local insiders have put together a write-in effort on Biden’s behalf, already backed by leading national Democrats.
As for Phillips getting to 42%, or even winning, Jim Demers, a former state representative and one of the write-in organizers, said, “I don’t know that it means a lot, but I suppose anything’s possible. He’s going to have to continue to unload a lot of his money.”
Phillips has started pointing out that he is a super delegate himself, “and the last thing they want is me on the stage in Chicago telling the truth,” he told two dozen people, including the grandson of Grover Cleveland (so far the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms), crowded into the top floor loft of a small coffee shop in North Conway, New Hampshire.
‘Are you ready for change?’
Phillips’ standard opener when he meets voters – “Are you ready for change?” – always gets a “yes,” as does whatever way he leads them to anxiety over Biden’s age and the prospect that the president might lose to Trump.
Evalyn Merrick, a former state representative Phillips stopped on the street in North Conway, told him she had seen the news of Biden saying he might not have run if Trump weren’t and thought, “What might happen if he reconsidered running right now?”
“It’s not too late,” Phillips nudged.
She took a button. She told him she was intrigued.
After Phillips walked away, Merrick told CNN that the decision is “tough,” but the stakes Trump creates for Biden are clear, no matter what she just heard.
If Biden is “going to be our candidate, we need to stand behind him lock, stock and barrel, 100%,” she said. “We have no choice.”
CNN’s Alison Main contributed to this story.