Dean Phillips, an affable congressman from Minnesota who mounted a quixotic challenge to the sitting president of his own party, predicated his presidential campaign on one thing: Joe Biden can’t win. His case was bolstered by the polling, which has consistently shown that members of the president’s own party are deeply dissatisfied with his performance. That proposition was put to the test in New Hampshire. But despite the bizarre nature of the contest, which resulted in Biden’s name not appearing on the ballot, Democrats demonstrated that Phillips’s premise was wrong.
When Phillips embarked on his romantic bid to unseat Biden, his campaign set expectations for his performance in New Hampshire high but not so high that they were wholly unreasonable. “The Phillips campaign has set 42 percent as a barometer for success, according to one of his advisers,” Politico reported earlier this month. But as the race neared, Phillips lowered expectations. “He’s been saying he’d be happy just to finish in the 20 percent range, considering he just started his campaign in late October and is relatively unknown on the national stage,” one Minnesota-based reporter wrote on the eve of the Granite State primary. That’s just about what he got.
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