Republicans watch eagerly as Phillips adds to Biden woes

Republicans are watching eagerly as primary challenges pile up against President Biden, hoping the Democratic infighting and agitation about his candidacy will weaken his stature in November. 

Earlier in the 2024 cycle, Republicans were preoccupied with their own front-runner’s flaws, frantic that former President Trump as the likely nominee would go into the general election bruised and full of legal liabilities. 

But now, with Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) as the latest to mount a bid against Biden amid his plummeting poll numbers, Republicans are hoping to shift the focus away from Trump’s myriad controversies — as well as from their recently chaotic search for a Speaker of the House.  

“Democrats are worried about anything that upsets the Trump v. Biden applecart,” said Brian Seitchik, a GOP strategist and former Trump campaign consultant. “Republicans are simply feeling buoyed by Trump’s improving numbers [and] Biden’s rapidly deteriorating numbers.” 

Biden’s ratings have indeed plunged even lower this week. While the majority of Democrats still support his reelection, he suffered a drastic, double-digit drop in standing among voters in his party, giving Republicans more ammunition to use against his lukewarm candidacy. 

A Gallup poll released Thursday provided a sobering glimpse into where the sitting president stands nearly a year out from Election Day. It showed an 11-point decline in Biden’s approval among Democrats. Among all registered voters surveyed, his numbers hit another low, showing only a staggering 37 percent of voters polled are happy with his performance. 

“Where things have gotten really politically complicated is over on the Democrat side. Biden’s numbers are historically atrocious,” said Gregg Keller, a veteran Republican political operative and former coalitions director on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.  

“This is a man who is about as unpopular as any American president has ever been,” Keller said. “You can’t look at Joe Biden’s current situation as a Republican and not feel great about it.” 

Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Arizona-based strategist, said both parties are facing big hurdles this cycle, but the current White House occupant will have to defend his position on wedge issues like immigration and the environment, where Republicans have been painting Biden and Democrats as ineffective and extreme.  

“Truth be told, all elected leaders’ approval numbers across the board are poor because both political parties no longer identify with a majority of the electorate,” said Coughlin. 

“It’s simply a continuous negative feedback cycle with one party blaming the other party and no true leader being able to distinguish themselves amongst the barrage of negativity which has infected our nation’s political discourse,” he added. “The rest is noise.” 

Democrats are infamous for discord within their ranks. But unlike the 2020 cycle, when the party overwhelmingly united around Biden as the presumptive nominee, the lead-up to 2024 has been a gradual airing of grievances about the president and his political shortcomings.  

Some are worried about his age, while most point to his daunting and consistent unpopularity. There are also issues about his perceived lack of policy accomplishments, which his aides and allies refute. Beyond the headline-level problems, there are major philosophical differences within the party about how Biden has conducted his role as the country’s chief executive. Progressives say he hasn’t done enough and has made strategic errors, while moderates mostly want to keep up the narrative that he’s the only Democrat who can beat Trump. 

Much of that sentiment is in the background. But increasingly, a small handful of Democrats have grown so dissatisfied that they have mounted long-shot campaigns to try to knock him off the ballot. National Democrats have refused to hold primary debates and have moved the calendar around, decisions critics on the left and right each see as political in nature.   

Biden is facing a third threat for the nomination — this time from a sitting member of Congress — as well as possible spoilers from two outsiders who left the Democratic Party to run as independents.  

Phillips said in his Friday announcement that he was explicitly concerned about Biden’s bad polling. 

“I think President Biden has done a spectacular job for our country, but it’s not about the past. This is an election about the future. I will not sit still, I will not be quiet in the face of numbers that are so clearly saying that we’re going to be facing an emergency next November,” Phillips said to CBS News. 

The congressman’s long-shot primary launch comes just a few months before voting in early primary states is scheduled to commence. He ran his first ad in New Hampshire, where he officially teed off his bid in Concord.    

While Phillips is considered a moderate, the president is also getting a lot of pushback from the progressive wing of his party. Cenk Uygur, a leftist media entrepreneur who is also running against him, has stressed the urgency of replacing him now, citing similar reasons as Phillips. He’s also being challenged by Marianne Williamson, a self-help and spiritual author and speaker running on a left-wing platform.  

“Biden is down to 37%!!! That’s a Gallup poll. There’s no way an incumbent at 37% wins,” said Uygur, reflecting on the staggering figure this week. “I’m not sure it’s ever happened in US history. Wake up, Democrats. We need a new candidate immediately!” 

Beyond disgruntled progressives, Biden also will have to maintain support among other demographics, including young people, Black, Latino, and Arab American voters whose enthusiasm for Democrats’ agenda and their leader has waned at various junctures.  

Republicans have seen his shaky standing with critical voting blocs as potential openings to court voters who have traditionally fallen on the other side of the aisle.  

“You’re going to see Trump come out and talk incessantly about how when he was president we had the lowest Hispanic unemployment, the lowest Black unemployment,” said Keller. “And contrasting that with the current high inflation environment in which we are in.” 

Republicans are watching all of the “noise,” as Coughlin called it, among Democrats unfold as they see Trump as more viable than they once did. While some are worried about another factor — independent bids posed by progressive academic Cornel West and environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — they also see them as helpful to their cause of putting a bad mark on the Democratic brand.  

“My sense of the Dean Phillips thing is that it goes less than nowhere,” Keller added. “I do think that the Kennedy thing is extremely complicated all around.” 

One Republican presidential campaign strategist based in the Midwest said “there is way more oxygen for that independent candidate than there is a Democrat in a traditional Democratic nominating process,” right now, which could add more unpredictability to the outcome.  

But as Kennedy works to get on a majority of state ballots, he is explicitly saying the same Democratic Party he once belonged to is broken — an argument Republicans see as helpful.

“He’s challenging the narratives that come but he’s challenging it from the left,” the GOP campaign operative said. “That is a man bites dog storyline right now that doesn’t happen.”