Dean Phillips To File Candidacy in New Hampshire Friday, Launch Primary Challenge Against Joe Biden

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips will announce a long-shot primary campaign against President Joe Biden on Friday in New Hampshire, according to multiple people with knowledge of the plans – presenting himself as the next generation of leader ready to take on the 80-year-old standard bearer of his party.

The announcement will come at the New Hampshire State House in Concord, according to flyers publicizing the event, where the congressman will then file for the state’s primary. Representative for Phillips informed the New Hampshire Secretary of State on Thursday that he would file for the primary on Friday.

Phillips’ bid will undoubtedly be an uphill climb. The congressman is unknown to almost all voters, jumping into the race remarkably late, and challenging a sitting president who has a massive campaign war chest and the entire party infrastructure behind him.

The congressman has been teasing a campaign for months. Citing Biden’s age – the president is the oldest man to ever hold the office – Phillips initially began urging other Democrats to challenge the President. When no one heeded his call – many, in fact, mocked it – the 54-year-old Phillips decided to put himself forward as a candidate.

Phillips’ contrast with Biden will almost certainly not center on policy differences. The Minnesota Democrat has not only been complementary of Biden’s presidency, but he has voted with the president 100% of the time and accepted Biden’s endorsement in his successful bid to unseat an incumbent Republican congressman in 2018.

The money behind Phillips’ run is also an open question. While Biden and Democratic committees supporting him raised $71 million in the third quarter, Phillips only raised $197,720 to his congressional account over the same three months. But Phillips could self-fund a portion of his campaign. The congressman’s birth father, Artie, died in the Vietnam War. His mother later married Eddie Phillips, heir to the Phillips Distilling Company. Before running for Congress, Phillips worked as president and CEO of his family’s distilling company and later as the head of Talenti Gelato before it was sold to Unilever in 2014.

According to Open Secrets, Phillips is personally worth over $64 million. 

Democrats mock, fume and ignore

Phillips’ announcement has been met with condemnation and derision – at least for those who thought it was worth a response.

When asked about his plans on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre simply said, “We appreciate the congressman's almost 100% support of this president as he's moved forward with some really important key legislative priorities for the American people.”

And the Biden campaign declined to comment ahead of the planned announcement.

The aspect that frustrates Democrats the most is the assistance a Phillips’ bid focused on Biden’s age could provide former President Donald Trump, who has looked to do the same with eyes on the general election.

Phillips “cannot win. The only thing he can do is damage Biden,” said Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic operative who now works at the anti-Trump Lincon Project.

In 1980, Trippi worked for Sen. Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge of incumbent President Jimmy Carter, a fight that went all the way to the convention in New York City that year. While Carter went on to defeat Kennedy, the Democrat would lose to Ronald Reagan just months later, an experience that Trippi says informs his view on Phillips today.

“The history is that the challenger never succeeds and the only outcome is damaging your party’s president in a way that has helped the opposition win,” Trippi said, citing other instances like Reagan challenging incumbent President Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primary before Ford lost the general election and commentator Pat Buchanan challenging President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primary before the incumbent lost to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton months later. “Historically, there has never been a path and the only outcome has been to weaken the president of the party, it doesn't matter which party.”

A New Hampshire focus

Phillips plans to center his campaign on New Hampshire, the one-time first in the nation primary state whose status was demoted by the Democratic National Committee after the 2020 campaign at Biden’s urging. The President instructed the committee to move South Carolina up in the primary process and demote both New Hampshire and Iowa in what was described as a way to diversify early state voters given both key early states are predominantly white.

New Hampshire has declined to move their primary to comply with the change and the committee has responded by urging candidates not to participate in the state’s primary by threatening to take away delegates from both the state and candidates who participate in the primary. Because of that change, Biden’s campaign manager officially announced this week that the President would not be on the primary ballot in the state. Democrats loyal to Biden have responded by pledging to muster a write-in campaign to support the President.

The changes to the primary calendar have deeply angered some top Democrats in New Hampshire, many of whom tie state pride to the fact that they vet presidential candidates with their first in the nation primary.

But in a sign of the uphill climb Phillips has with New Hampshire voters, even the most outspoken critics of the Democratic National Committee are not ready to get on board with Phillips.

When the committee announced the calendar and plans to punish candidates who appear on the New Hampshire ballot, longtime Biden supporter and former New Hampshire House Speaker Stephen Shurtleff said he would punish the president for the decision.

"I'm sure he's thinking, 'Oh, some of those people, they're bluffing. They'll be there for me.' I tell you right now, I won't,” said Shurtleff. “I'll look for another candidate before I support Joe Biden if he should go so far as to take away the first-in-the-nation primary.”

Shurtleff told The Messenger this week that Phillips has personally called him twice ahead of his presidential bid. “I enjoyed speaking with him,” Shurtleff said, but he wasn’t ready to commit and, in fact, was still supportive of Biden.

“The first thing I did was to go on Wikipedia and learn about him,” Shurtleff said of Phillips. “I do have a lot of admiration for the president. He has campaigned three times in New Hampshire. I still think the world of him. But I am very disappointed.”

Troy Price, the former executive director of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, told The Messenger that if people like Shurtleff are not backing Phillips, his support could be negligible.

“Are folks unhappy with the president for pushing the new calendar? Yes. Are they happy with the DNC? Sure. But are they so unhappy that they are going to go with someone they have never heard of and just got in three months before the primary? No,” said Price. “He’s got a really tough road to hoe.”

But Price added that whole that “doesn't mean he won’t cause problems for the president in the course of this… the reality is that path forward appears very narrow for him to try to accomplish what he wants to accomplish - whatever that is.”

Polling backs this up: A University of New Hampshire poll released in September found 78% of likely Democratic primary voters backed Biden, a number that was up from 70% in July.

And by focusing on New Hampshire, a state that has bucked the rules when others have agreed to follow them, has also enraged Democrats in South Carolina, given they have been granted first in the nation status.

"South Carolina is an important testing ground for presidential candidates and so far, Dean Phillips is failing it,” Christale Spain, chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told The Messenger. “The Congressman from Minnesota’s choice to disregard South Carolina’s historic first in the nation primary, where Black voters, rural voters, and Southern voters will finally be at the forefront, in favor of competing in a state that will offer zero delegates, is saying the quiet part out loud – he’s an unserious candidate who doesn’t appear to care about what our majority Black Democratic electorate has to say.”