Biden and political allies shrug off congressman’s Democratic primary challenge

With Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) in the 2024 Democratic primary race, President Joe Biden and his political team can hope the Minnesota congressman is more John Ashbrook, less Ted Kennedy.

Phillip’s center-left politics are closer to Kennedy, the 46-year Massachusetts senator and liberal icon, whose 1980 Democratic primary challenge to President Jimmy Carter helped sink the Georgian’s reelection bid. But Phillips’s political standing is more like Ashbrook in 1972, as a relatively obscure House member. Ashbrook, of Ohio, challenged President Richard Nixon for the GOP nomination from the right. It proved no more than a nuisance, as Nixon claimed his party’s nod without breaking a sweat and then won a 49-state landslide that November.

THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT

Phillips, 54, jumped into the race on Oct. 27, filing for the New Hampshire primary. Phillips says he is offering himself as an alternative to Biden due to the incumbent’s age — the president turning 81 on Nov. 20. Phillips contends his 2024 Democratic primary bid is necessary due to the real possibility that Biden, with persistently low approval ratings in swing states, could lose a rematch against the incumbent’s vanquished 2020 rival, former President Donald Trump.

That’s a different tactical approach from presidential primary challenges over the past half-century-plus, which focused on ideological differences. For instance, in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson, unpopular over his administration’s Vietnam policies, quit his reelection bid after a narrower-than-expected 49%-42% New Hampshire primary victory over Democratic Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war insurgent. Vice President Hubert Humphrey nabbed the Democratic nomination but came up short against Nixon in the general election.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford barely fended off a Republican primary challenge from former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who deemed the incumbent insufficiently conservative. That helped soften up Ford against Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor, who won a relatively tight race.

And four years later, Carter was badly wounded by a Democratic primary challenge from Kennedy, a scion of the nation’s most famous political family. Running on a platform of undiluted liberalism that culminated in his “The Dream Shall Never Die” Democratic convention speech, Carter got drubbed by Reagan, who at age 69 had claimed the GOP nomination on his third try.

A dozen years later, President George H.W. Bush faced what at least early on was a surprisingly strong GOP primary challenge from political commentator and former Nixon and Reagan aide Pat Buchanan. Running on nationalist-populist themes that presaged Trump’s 2016 shock win by 24 years, Buchanan’s challenge split the Republican base between the establishment, embodied by the patrician Bush, and an insurgent party rump that, it turns out, would go on to wield considerable political influence.

These presidential primary precedents might all spell trouble for Biden in his 2024 reelection bid as he faces Phillips. But the president can point to the example of Nixon in 1972, the year Biden was elected to the Senate as a Delaware Democrat at age 29, as a strong counterargument against the trend of serious presidential primary challengers weakening incumbents.

Alex Brandon/AP

Ashbrook, elected to the House in 1960, a dozen years later ran on the slogan “No Left Turns,” reflecting frustration felt by some conservatives with Nixon. The Republican incumbent, Ashbrook noted, had “turned left” domestically on issues like budget deficits, affirmative action, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and wage and price controls. Ashbrook further slammed Nixon on international affairs for pushing detente with the Soviet Union and opening U.S. relations with the People’s Republic of China for the first time since communists seized power in the country in 1949.

Ashbrook won 9.8% of the vote in the kickoff New Hampshire primary, with similar results in subsequent big state primaries: 9% in Florida, then 10% in California. Ashbrook quit the race after that and supported Nixon “with great reluctance.”

None of it made a dent in Nixon’s chances. He won the Republican nomination easily and the general election in a 520-17 Electoral College cakewalk over Democratic rival George McGovern. Though comparisons only go so far. That kind of general election shellacking is tough to imagine in today’s narrowly divided electorate, where presidential races are decided by a cumulative tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states.

Uphill Primary Climb For Phillips
The Biden reelection team’s strategy is effectively to ignore Phillips, whose House voting record is nearly 100% in support of the president’s agenda.

“President Biden is proud of the historic, unified support he has from across the Democratic Party for his reelection,” his campaign said in a statement the day of Phillips’s announcement. “The stakes of near year’s election could not be higher for the American people, and the campaign is hard at work mobilizing the winning coalition that President Biden can uniquely bring together once again to beat the MAGA Republicans next November.”

Not that Phillips can’t potentially inflict political damage on Biden’s reelection campaign. Phillips is premising his campaign around the need for generational change, an implicit reminder about doubts over Biden, who in 2021, at age 78, became the oldest president ever. Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term.

Democrats got a taste of how badly such intraparty strife can sting in 2016 when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) challenged eventual nominee Hillary Clinton from the left. Sanders vocally empathized with the plight of working-class workers in the Wolverine State, which in some ways overlapped with Trump’s populist approach. Sanders in the March 8, 2016, contest beat Clinton 49.68% to 48.26%. That foreshadowed Trump’s November 47.50% to 47.27% Michigan win over Clinton, the first time the state had voted for a Republican nominee since 1988 and a crucial victory in Trump’s triumph nationally.

Phillips also will attempt to resurrect the prominence of New Hampshire after Biden tried to end its reign as the first-in-the-nation primary by pushing South Carolina to the front of the line. New Hampshire is statutorily required to hold its contest first. (No date has been set.) If New Hampshire disobeys the Democratic National Committee, New Hampshire’s delegates won’t count at the party’s 2024 nominating convention.

And even a symbolic New Hampshire victory for Phillips may be tough since Biden’s New Hampshire allies have a write-in campaign going to notch a win for the president.

Phillips came to Congress in the 2018 Democratic wave by beating a 10-year incumbent Republican in a suburban Minneapolis House seat that had been in GOP hands for generations. Phillips was already well known in the district as a gelato entrepreneur who had successfully expanded his family’s liquor business. He is in the top 5% of wealthiest House members, with a net worth upward of $50 million, per congressional financial disclosure forms.

Still, Biden allies are keeping a close eye on Phillips since he is willing to step into the political breach where other Democrats wouldn’t, with some internal party concerns privately rising. Biden’s approval rating is 37%, his presidential low, per a recent Gallup poll. A recent Morning Consult survey had him trailing Trump by 1 point in Pennsylvania, 2 in Wisconsin, 4 in Arizona, and 5 in Georgia.

Publicly, Phillips faces stiff political winds from Democratic activists and rank and file.

“Biden’s already beaten Trump once. History teaches us that he’s the one guy who absolutely can beat him again. Everyone else is just a science experiment,” Jim Messina, campaign manager for Barack Obama’s successful 2012 presidential reelection bid, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Democratic state Del. Joe Vogel, 26, of Maryland, running for the open 6th Congressional District in the Old Line State’s western panhandle and northwestern Washington, D.C., exurbs, wrote on X, “I’m voting for President Joe Biden. You know I’m all in for a new generation of leadership — but I know this President has delivered for younger generations like few others have — and he’s by far the best Democratic candidate to hold the White House in 2024.”

Prior presidential primary challengers have heard similar sentiments from party stalwarts. And by challenging Biden, Phillips may be putting his congressional career in jeopardy. He was asked to leave a low-level position in the House Democratic leadership. And he’s attracted a 2024 Democratic primary opponent in the western Minneapolis suburbs 3rd District from Ron Harris, a DNC official.

Moreover, since Phillips isn’t running an ideologically based primary challenge against a president of his own party but one that highlights the incumbent’s age and potential infirmities, he’s not even likely to be remembered well by party stalwarts in future years.

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Ashbrook, who died at age 53 in 1982 amid a campaign for a Senate seat from Ohio, is still fondly recalled today by conservatives of a certain vintage and their political heirs. The Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University in north-central Ohio was named for the late congressman in 1983. A periodic John M. Ashbrook Memorial Dinner at the center features leading conservative speakers, highlighted by President Reagan in 1983 at the center’s dedication, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1993, future GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2010, and then-House Speaker John Boehner in June 2011.

Unless Phillips shocks the political world and upsets Biden in the 2024 nomination fight, it’s hard to imagine a university center, tribute dinner, or really anything being devoted to him by party stalwarts. More like an asterisk in political history.