The Lies Dean Phillips Was Told
Failing Political Flacks Misunderstood The Electorate Yet Again
I admit I feel bad for Dean Phillips.
The three-term Minnesota Congressman who became arguably the most prominent Democratic primary challenger to President Biden didn’t catch fire in the New Hampshire Democratic Party primary on Tuesday. Phillips finished with less than 20 percent of the vote, more than 50 points behind Biden, who wasn’t even on the ballot. More than 77,000 New Hampshire Democrats wrote in Biden’s name. Phillips' once-promising political career – he held a safe seat in the Minneapolis suburbs and was a potential future candidate for Governor or Senator in his light blue state – is likely over.
Phillips’ campaign has been entirely focused on Biden’s age and poor poll numbers and has been run by former campaign managers for 2020 candidates Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang. Former Republican consultant and Never Trumper Steve Schmidt was involved in Phillip’s campaign launch. Phillip’s chief advisor is Sanders’ former campaign manager Jeff Weaver, the architect of Sanders’ ill-conceived strategy to win the 2020 nomination with a plurality over a divided field. Phillips’ campaign manager is Zach Graumann, the architect of Yang’s tone-deaf bubble of a campaign in 2020, and who later joined Yang in a half-cocked effort to form the listless Forward Party.
From early on it was clear that the Phillips campaign was the brainchild of political consults that have been exiled for running terrible campaigns. Unable to find work and unskilled at doing anything else, they created a grift to keep themselves employed in the otherwise quiet 2024 campaign season.
The grift was as simple as it was logical. Democrats have been telling pollsters for over a year now that they want another candidate other than the 81-year-old Biden in 2024, but no major Democrat entered the race. The Democratic electorate is desperate for someone, anyone, but the only people who challenged Biden are an anti-vaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and an unserious self-help guru Marianne Williamson. Philips, at least has a political background. A relative moderate and loyal party foot soldier, Phillips has friends in Congress who perhaps could be persuaded to endorse him and help him gain momentum with Democrats who wanted someone other than Biden. It was obvious Weaver, Graumann, and Schmidt either misunderstood what the polls truly meant – misreading the Democratic electorate is Weaver’s specialty – or, more likely, they used perceived Democratic discontent to lure Phillips into the race, gaslighting him into thinking he could win while they cashed in on another election cycle.
One major flaw in Phillips’ campaign was never releasing any polling showing him ahead of Trump. This was his entire campaign message: Biden can’t beat Trump, but he can. Democrats value electability over anything else, and they don’t take risks. One of the primary reasons Biden won the nomination in 2020 was that he was seen as the most likely candidate, perhaps the only candidate, who could beat Trump. Hillary Clinton was nominated in 2016 in part because Democrats thought Bernie Sanders was too far to the left to win; Howard Dean faced a similar hurdle in 2004. The party still lives in the shadows of the 1972, 1980, and 1984 elections where nearly the entire country was painted in red. The eldest Democrats, who are still the most loyal voting blocs, remember it well. If Phillips was going to make his campaign about how Biden can’t win, but he can, then he has to show the receipts, and he did not do that.
I find it hard to believe a presidential campaign didn’t poll their candidate against his likely general election opponent. All campaigns do this. The only obvious conclusion is that polls didn’t show him any more electable than Biden, or this campaign was truly unserious and didn’t bother to do one of the basic things a campaign does. Either is plausible.
Indeed, that’s a major reason bigger candidates like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker didn’t run; there was no clear indication any of them could beat Trump in the general election even if they managed to beat Biden or push him, and Vice President Kamala Harris, out of the race. Several Democratic insiders personally told me this last year. Potential candidates had private polling done that showed they were not more likely to beat Trump than Biden, nor were they likely to beat Biden or Harris in the primary, so they took a pass.
Phillips, though, was being advised by a former campaign manager who devised a baffling strategy to win his candidate the nomination with only a third of the vote, and former Republican operatives whose only real interest in making money when they’ve been blackballed from Donald Trump’s GOP. A Phillips campaign that was largely devoid of issues, vacillating widely between moderate and progressive viewpoints depending on when and where you believe Democratic voters might be reconsidering Biden, was painfully stupid. Dragging out endorsements from has-beens like Yang came across as a joke. It would not surprise me if this was all a ruse and we find out the Dean Phillips campaign was secretly a political-themed reality show that will air on Netflix, Bravo! or TLC next year.
Even after his disappointing finish in New Hampshire, Phillips is still in the race. He will only bow out if polls prove he doesn’t have a better chance at beating Trump than Biden; polls that, as I said, his campaign should already have conducted.
Let’s be honest though, we know the real reason he’s still in the race: to give his high-ranking staff of political failures a paycheck for a little while longer. Phillips is lucky Biden doesn’t hold grudges, perhaps he’ll find himself in a low-level cabinet position or ambassadorship in his second term as a consolation prize.
I’ll shed no tears for Phillips, who seems naïve as hell (buying a House seat in a year that a sack of lima beans could have won it as a Democrat does not a political juggernaut make). I’d much prefer to see Angie Craig run statewide in Minnesota.
(Miss you on Twitter, Nick. Hope life is treating you well.)
Baffling! It used to be that consultants had to find someone rich to facilitate their grifts - now there are enough small dollar donations to fund many ego trips. Phillips now will forever be associated with those sad photos of him at empty rallies.