Dean Phillips to step down from Democratic leadership role

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) will step down from his role in House Democratic Leadership due to his publicly floating a bid for president against the Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden.

In a statement to Axios, Phillips said that because he is no longer aligned with the rest of the Democratic Caucus on presidential politics, he will be stepping down from his role as co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

HOW MCCARTHY LED HIS DIVIDED CONFERENCE IN AVOIDING A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

“My convictions relative to the 2024 presidential race are incongruent with the majority of my caucus, and I felt it appropriate to step aside from elected leadership,” he said.

The centrist Democrat represents a Minnesota district that was deep red until he flipped it in 2018. Despite voting in support of Biden’s position 100% of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, Phillips has been agitating against the president for months.

In August, he called on Democrats to put up a candidate to run against the president in 2024 after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to continue investigating Hunter Biden. Phillips has been vocally against Biden running for reelection in 2024 and has publicly mulled his own potential bid against the sitting president.

“I am thinking about it. I haven’t ruled it out,” Phillips said on a podcast when asked about it. “I’m concerned that there is no alternative.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Besides his disagreements with Biden, Phillips was the first Democrat to call on Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) to resign when he was indicted on corruption charges last month.

Several other Democrats have come around to calling on Menendez to resign, but Phillips remains in the minority of his party as an elected official calling for an alternative to Biden next year. It’s not clear how Phillips’s opposition to the president, a sentiment voiced by voters in several polls, will affect his reelection chances next year.