It has been only one day since Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips announced he was taking on President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination and he is already getting a pretty cold shoulder from his party.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens were among those who quickly took to social media shortly after Mr. Phillips’s announcement. The mayor denounced the Minnesota representative’s candidacy, accusing the 54-year old three-term lawmaker of “hosting an attention-seeking stunt” that he specifically said is insulting to black voters and characterized in a lengthy tweet on X as undermining the successes of the Biden-Harris administration.
“I’m not sure what he’s doing in New Hampshire today, but I know what he’s not doing: he’s not mounting a serious or meaningful bid to be President of the United States,” the mayor wrote, pointing out that Mr. Phillips is just a duplicate of President Biden, having voted in favor of his policies “100 percent of the time.”
At the same time, Mr. Phillips’s own party quickly and very publicly tied him to accepting past donations from conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s generous billionaire friend Harlan Crow.
Mr. Crow, a Republican mega donor, was only in the news just days before Mr. Phillips announced his bid for the presidency for forgiving a $267,000 loan he made to Justice Thomas for the purchase of a luxury motorhome. It had previously been reported that Mr. Crow had paid the private school tuition for Justice Clarence’s grand nephew, lavished the Justice with expensive vacation trips and funded real estate deals for him.
He has already been called a “fraud” in hundreds of social media posts for his ties to Mr. Crow.
Democrat Candidate
Mr. Phillips, who declared he has been a Democrat since he was 11 years old and still “believes deeply in the Democratic Party today,” made his announcement Friday in front of the statehouse in the key battleground state of New Hampshire. In the background was a luxury tour bus brandishing his brightly blue campaign slogan, “Dean Phillips For President.”The challenger said he was not running in opposition of President Biden “who has my affection and my gratitude,” but “rather with two core convictions in the Democratic candidate: Who can win the 2024 election and second, it is time for the torch to be passed to a new generation of American leaders right here, all around the country and all around the world.”
Mr. Phillips, grandson and son of the mother and daughter behind the fabled “Dear Abby” column, is also the first and only Jewish-American running for the presidency.
Jewish Democrat and former New Hampshire lawmaker Jeffrey Salloway, who has ties to national party politics, told The Epoch Times, he believes that “can help Phillips a little,” with anti-semitism politics and the Israel conflict being growing mainstream issues in the race for the White House.
Mr. Salloway, who is also a professor emeritus in health management and policy at the University of New Hampshire, also believes there is a “slight opportunity” for Mr. Phillips to become an emergent candidate, depending on how much worse polling gets for President Biden.
“I don’t believe that [Mr. Phillips] has a chance, but it is a long way to the primaries,” Mr. Salloway said. “And given Biden’s age and given the House of Representatives investigation into Biden, I think that the landscape could change.”
An impeachment inquiry is being conducted by the House Oversight Committee into allegations that President Biden used his political influences to engage in corrupt and lucrative business practices with foreign countries including China.
Mr. Salloway, who does not support President Biden and is instead leaning towards former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, added that he believes a significant enough decline in the polls for Biden will surface far more influential Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom over Mr. Phillips.
He and others also speculate that Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent, poses far more of a threat to President Biden’s reelection than Mr. Phillips.
Republicans seem to be in fact the only optimists when it comes to Mr. Phillips’s candidacy.
New Hampshire State Rep. Judy Aaron, a Jewish Republican, told The Epoch Times that given President Biden’s historic low approval ratings, she believes Mr. Phillips already has a voter base given the economic challenges and war facing Americans and the world.
Results of a new Gallup poll released this week show that President Biden’s already record-low approval rating has slipped even more.
The poll shows he fell another 11 percent in just the past month to hold now just a 37 percent approval rating—the lowest of any presidency in America’s history.
The polls also indicate he is losing support among independent voters, with a four percent slip in approval.
The same week that poll results were released, President Biden confirmed that he would not be registering to participate in the New Hampshire primaries, which has slighted both Republicans and Democrats.
The announcement follows President Biden’s highly-transparent move to foil the New Hampshire’s century-long first-in-the-nation primary status, moving the first primary to South Carolina where voters have favored him in past elections.
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley, who pleaded with President Biden not to upset the state’s historic primary rank out of concern it would hand a defeat to the party, is now predicting the incumbent will win the Democratic nomination as a write-in candidate.
On the Republican side, New Hampshire GOP Party Chairman Chris Ager told The Epoch Times that he sees President Biden’s absence as an open door for Mr. Phillips.
“We welcome Congressman Phillips to New Hampshire,” he said. “We look forward to a prominent Democrat who is not afraid to retail campaign in the Granite State.”
