U.S. Representative Dean Phillips, the relatively little-known Minnesota Democrat who has announced that he is challenging Joe Biden for president, has long portrayed himself as a moderate voice in Congress and a champion of bipartisanship.
The three-term congressman drives around his district in the western suburbs of Minneapolis in a 1960s-era van he’s dubbed the “Government Repair Truck.” He holds moderated “Common Ground” conversations with Democratic and Republican voters, according to the Star Tribune.
A member of the House Problem Solvers Caucus, Phillips, 54, touts his work with Chip Roy, the conservative Texas lawmaker, on relief for small-business owners during the Covid-19 pandemic. He’s also been a leader on a bipartisan bill to increase policing ranks by recruiting a diverse pool of candidates who may otherwise turn to other lines of work.
Last year, he urged Democrats in Wyoming to cross the aisle to vote for Republican Liz Cheney in her doomed effort to fend off a Donald Trump-backed challenger.
In an interview with CBS News that aired on Friday morning, Phillips acknowledged that he was running. “I have to,” he said. During the interview, he said that Biden has done a “spectacular job for our country, but it’s not about the past. This is an election about the future.”
He is expected to formally kick off his campaign today in Concord, New Hampshire.
While Phillips may talk a good game about being a voice of moderation and bipartisanship, he has consistently voted like a left-wing Democratic partisan. A FiveThirtyEight tracker from 2021-22 found that Phillips voted with Biden’s preferred position on issues 100 percent of the time, including on things like collective bargaining rights, expanded firearms regulations, out-of-state abortion service access, and funding for the war in Ukraine.
In 2021, he voted to pass the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package with no Republican support. He also supported federalizing elections with the For the People Act, a Democratic wish-list of voting changes opposed by all House Republicans.
He’s also refused to work with Republicans who he believes “bear responsibility” for the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol because he believes they are “dangerous, plain and simple.”
Minnesota Republicans have called Phillips’ claims of bipartisanship disingenuous and fraudulent. “Dean votes with Nancy Pelosi 99 percent of the time, so Minnesotans should take his claims that he is bipartisan with a grain of salt,” Representative Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican, said of his colleague in 2021, according to the Star Tribune.
While Phillips’s politics can sometimes be confounding, his presidential campaign has simply baffled most political analysts. Phillips, a businessman and wealthy heir to his family’s distilling empire, has virtually no support from prominent elected Democrats, including in Minnesota. His chances of unseating Biden seem to be exceedingly slim.
“I don’t think his presidential candidacy is a serious one. I think he’s probably going to get a pretty rude awakening when he sees how people respond to him,” Ryan Dawkins, a political science professor at Carleton College in Minnesota told National Review.
Larry Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, told CBS News in Minnesota that Phillips’s candidacy “seems to be a vanity project where he imagines himself kind of saving the Democratic Party and the republic. But he looks around, and there is no one else following him.”
Phillips, who describes himself on his website as a businessman, a civic leader, and an “eternal optimist,” first started flirting with the idea of running against Biden about a year ago.
In a radio interview, he said that while he has “respect for Joe Biden” and thinks he’s “a man of decency, of good principle, of compassion, of empathy and of strength,” he also said that he doesn’t believe Biden should be the Democratic nominee in 2024.
Biden, already the oldest president in American history, would be 82 when he would be inaugurated for a second term.
“I think the country would be well-served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up,” he said in the radio interview.
In a prepared statement to the media, he said: “Under no condition can we afford another four years of Donald Trump, and while Joe Biden was clearly the right candidate at the right time two years ago, it’s my hope that both major parties put forth new candidates of principle, civility, and integrity in 2024.”
Phillips continued to say that there are other more prominent Democrats who would be stronger challengers to Biden, but he didn’t rule out running himself.
Looking at polls that show a large percentage of Democratic voters would prefer a new candidate next year, Phillips worried that with Biden on top of the ticket, Democrats could set themselves up for a replay of 2016 when Trump upset Hillary Clinton.
In July, Politico reported that Phillips has been “receiving inquiries about his willingness to challenge Biden” and that he was meeting with donors in New York City.
“I didn’t run for Congress to stay in my lane,” Phillips told the Star Tribune that month.
But just weeks later, he said running for president was “not something as of today I see happening for a number of reasons,” including that it would take a lot of time and effort to set up a competitive campaign and infrastructure in multiple states.
He suggested that he would make a decision by September, but held off on an announcement. Earlier this month, he stepped away from his position in Democratic House leadership because of his disagreements with party leaders over Biden’s re-election bid.
Phillips announcement has been “maddening” for many Democrats. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis told the Star Tribune that it is “irresponsible to have a candidate who could possibly guarantee Trump’s reelection and destroy any path to progress.”
Dawkins, the Carleton College professor, said Phillips may be building his brand in anticipation of some future political or media position, though Phillips has dismissed that. He says he’s taken an “extraordinary amount of heat” from Democrats, and that running against Biden is clearly not a good way to raise his profile with the party’s establishment.
“This is all about conviction and principle,” he told the Star Tribune. “I trust people will ultimately see that because if not, then I really made a big error in my judgment.”
Dawkins suspects that Phillips is trying to build a national brand as a “maverick.”
“He wants to say, listen, I care about getting stuff done. I’m willing to cross party lines doing that, I’m willing to make compromises,” Dawkins said.
The problem, Dawkins said, is that while Americans pretty consistently say they want candidates who will compromise for the good of the country, when it comes to policy specifics and clear winners and losers in proposed deals “that space evaporates pretty quickly” and there tends to be a “great deal of calcification around party ID and things like that.”
“I think the space he’s trying to fill is largely illusory at this point,” Dawkins said.
Phillips has already missed the deadline to appear on the Nevada ballot. Dawkins said he may be focusing on New Hampshire, because the Democratic National Committee hasn’t sanctioned the state’s primary—New Hampshire Democrats still intend to hold the first primary, even though the DNC has awarded it to South Carolina. Biden isn’t expected to be on the New Hampshire ballot, and the DNC isn’t expected to award delegates based on the vote.
Phillips can probably count on getting some free media exposure for a couple of weeks around the New Hampshire primary, though Dawkins questions how valuable that will be.
“He probably is well intentioned, but I just don’t see how this is going to be successful in any significant way,” Dawkins said.
Phillips is an avowed opponent of Trump. Dawkins said he doesn’t see how his candidacy will help Democrats defeat Trump, if Trump turns out to be the Republican nominee in 2024.
“I’m honestly not convinced it hurts Joe Biden that much either, though,” he said. “I think this might just end up being a lot of sound and fury that ultimately signifies nothing.”