Dean Phillips’s vibe-killing presidential bid only benefits Republicans

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) has publicly lauded President Joe Biden as “a wonderful and remarkable man” with an “extraordinary legacy.” Launching his campaign for president, he commended Biden for doing a “spectacular job.” He adores Joe Biden, saying he “saved this country.”

Effusive compliments and then a primary challenge: This is officially the most “Minnesota Nice” presidential campaign in history. It is also doomed to fail.

With no new policy proposals, a message mirroring the White House and a weak contrast with Biden, Phillips is recreating the uneventful Republican-primary-about-nothing for Democrats. Note: It’s hard to run against someone you have voted with 100 percent of the time. 

Despite Phillips’s belief in the need for a competitive primary (sidebar: he will not provide one), the lack of a robust Democratic challenge to Biden isn’t historically surprising or concerning. As the sitting president, Biden leverages the advantage of his incumbency, a previous win over Donald Trump and a thorough vetting stemming from his long political career. A sitting Democratic president has not faced a serious challenge since Jimmy Carter in 1980.

In contrast, Dean Phillips is a two-and-a-half-term congressman, arguably the eighth most recognizable Democrat in Minnesota on a good day. He even admitted he is “not well-positioned” for a presidential run. 

So, why are we here?

Phillips argues that the only way to assess Biden’s potential against Trump is through a contested primary. Yet, what, exactly, is the litmus test he wishes Biden to pass? Is it Biden’s age that’s in question? What must be done to demonstrate his vitality? Would more visits to active war zones like Kyiv and Tel Aviv prove it?

If the president’s immutable age is the center of his campaign, then the Phillips effort will serve one purpose: to clumsily fuel the GOP false equivalency machine, giving Republicans ammunition for their unfair age-based attack, conveniently focusing on Biden, age 80 when Trump, age 77, could have been his high school classmate.

A previously unreported finding in an Associate Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll shows that among respondents who said both Trump and Biden were too old to serve,  “61 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden, compared with 13 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.”

The rational verdict on whether Joe Biden is up to the job lies in the results: A 50-year low unemployment rate, the passage of infrastructure and CHIPS and Science Act bills and bipartisan approval of gun safety and veterans’ legislation. You know, all legislation that Phillips supported.

On his best day in this primary, Dean Phillips will hope to be Michael Bloomberg, the most recent late entrant in a presidential race in 2020. However, Bloomberg could afford to hire thousands of staff and spend over $1 billion in four months. 

As for Phillips, his ability to rapidly build a campaign operation appears limited to introductory phone calls to strategists (with New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley admitting, “I had to Google him to find out who he was”), many of whom have expressed no interest in working for him.

And what’s the delegate path to victory? Phillips’s focus seems to center on New Hampshire, where the latest University of New Hampshire poll in the Democratic primary showed Biden at 79 percent. 

Even that overlooks that New Hampshire has been eliminated from the early state nominating process and is holding an unsanctioned primary. So, is Phillips’s gamble in South Carolina, the state that propelled Joe Biden to victory in the 2020 nomination? Absurd.

Put bluntly, this is not a serious campaign. Elections are about many things: incumbent performance, the economy, social policy and (possibly this cycle) foreign affairs or national security. The danger of the Phillips campaign is not that he is capable of defeating President Biden in a primary. 

It is that the intangible quality of “vibes” plays a much larger role in American politics than any serious practitioner would care to admit, and they are in a position to inject disarray on a daily basis into the process, seeding bad faith Republican doubt in the minds of voters.

So, Democrats face a straightforward question: Do they prefer an untested, unknown House Democrat with little experience to first defeat Donald Trump and then take the foreign policy reins during a Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and a crisis in the Middle East? Or do you prefer the guy he agrees with on everything who has proven he can do the job but happens to be older? 

Biden frequently says: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” In this case, Dean Phillips is neither.

Tim Hogan is a Democratic strategist. He previously worked with Amy Klobuchar during her 2020 presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton during her 2016 run.