“Not in New Hampshire” is a new website that Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips launched over the weekend against President Joe Biden to highlight the president’s conspicuous absence from the state’s primary ballot.
To underscore his message, Mr. Phillips’s campaign uses a reversal of the legendary tales of rare sightings of Bigfoot.
The campaign features a human-like mythical creature searching for President Biden along the streets, in diners, and at presidential campaign events throughout the battleground state.
“I’m something of an expert on elusive creatures,” the Bigfoot character says in a video on the website.
Bigfoot explains that he decided to challenge himself to find the president in New Hampshire during this primary season.
“I thought I was good at hiding. So I asked around, ‘Have you seen Joe?’ I mean how can you have tens and thousands of thousands of people looking for you all the time and not one person can find you?” he says.
Bigfoot goes on to say that he never did find President Biden but that he kept seeing this guy “Dean Phillips” everywhere and that Mr. Phillips actually seemed to care about the voters.
The video concludes with an attack on President Biden’s write-in campaign spearheaded by New Hampshire Democrats: “Now, some big money Super PAC is telling us to vote for him. Why write him in? When he’s written us off.”
Also over the weekend, the Minnesota congressman, who was approved last month along with other long-shot Democrats to compete in the Iowa caucus, made candid accusations that President Biden is engineering media blackouts of him.
He says the conservative media is giving him more coverage than proverbial pro-Democratic mainstream networks such as CNN.
“I do know of specific cases where representatives of the Biden campaign have been very clear to others about trying to not attend events of mine, to not support me, and to not platform me,” Mr. Phillips told Politico, declining to name names.
“It is almost antithetical to democratic principles, which include debate, deliberation and ultimately compromise.”
The allegations come on the heels of a campaign event that Mr. Phillips held in Manchester to which no one came.
It was a stark contrast to the thousands showing up at events in the same city featuring former President Donald Trump.
The three-term, 52-year-old congressman fared better a few days later when he drew a small crowd in Portsmouth, a picturesque city that has long been dubbed Cambridge North for its liberal denizens.
Roughly 100 people showed up on Jan. 13 at a local brewery in pouring rain to see and hear Mr. Phillips, a liquor store tycoon.
He’s also heir to the famous Dear Abby columnist, the late Pauline Phillips, who used the pen name “Abigail Van Buren.”
Rated the wealthiest member of Congress with a $64 million net worth, Mr. Phillips has thrown $2 million of his own cash into his campaign.
Now, with a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, Mr. Phillips is hoping to get a better turnout on Jan. 17 at the Post and Beam Brewing Co.
Located in Peterborough, an antiquers haven, the brewery is just down the road—by New Hampshire standards—from where the iconic Yankee Magazine has been published since 1935.
Mr. Phillips’s campaign manager, Zach Graumann, a Wall Street executive with a side gig of running a company called Longshot Strategies, has complained about media ignoring many of Mr. Phillips’s unsung accomplishments.
These include raising $1 million from 600 different donations within a month after his late entry into the presidential race. Mr. Phillips didn’t declare until the end of October 2023.
“We are building a campaign that will see us not just through New Hampshire, but through Super Tuesday all the way to the Democratic convention,“ Mr. Graumann said in a statement. ”We are just getting started in this race.”
President Biden announced that he would be absent from the New Hampshire primary after New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, at the behest of both state Democrats and Republicans, preempted the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) selection of Feb. 6 as the state’s primary election day.
Instead, the state will hold its primary on Jan. 23 to preserve its more than 100-year-old tradition of being the first state in the country to primary.
Still, Mr. Phillips has a long way to go to catch up to President Biden.
Polls show that President Biden, although with the lowest approval rating on record within his own party than any other president, is still getting more than 80 percent support from Democratic voters in New Hampshire.
However, Mr. Phillips, like other candidates and even potential candidates, is hoping to bump up his numbers by appealing to New Hampshire’s huge population of non-party voters.
According to the Independent Voter Network (IVN), New Hampshire has the seventh-highest number of independent voters in the United States with almost 42 percent of its registered voters unaffiliated.
It’s also one of only a handful of states that allow independents to choose their party on election day.
Manchin Makes an Appearance
On Jan. 12, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who’s eyeing a presidential run as a third-party candidate, talked to a crowd of Democrats in New Hampshire about the need to take the party nomination away from President Biden. He cited “about 100,000” independents as a means to do so.The centrist Democrat has indicated support for impeaching President Biden over his open border policy that’s flooding America with millions of illegal immigrants.
He has also cited the administration’s using billions in federal tax dollars intended to promote the use of domestic fossil fuels to instead promote what Mr. Manchin calls climate change propaganda.
In terms of Mr. Phillips’s campaign, even if he does make fast progress in narrowing the gap between President Biden and himself by Jan. 23, the DNC has made it clear that it would be a moot point.
In a recent letter to New Hampshire Democratic Chairman Ray Buckley, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee indicated that it won’t award delegates to candidates based on primary election results.
New Hampshire accounts for 33 of the 1,991 delegates a Democratic presidential candidate needs nationally to win the party nomination, based on a World Population Review breakdown.
