by Frank Holmes, reporter
Running for president takes great confidence—possibly even arrogance—and nothing can shatter that confidence like one thing: No one caring enough to show up at your speech.
That’s exactly what happened to a Democratic candidate for president.
The voters of New Hampshire had the opportunity to meet a bona fide presidential candidate at the DoubleTree hotel in Manchester on Tuesday—and everyone in the state said, “No thanks.”
The would-be president is Rep. Dean Phillips, R-Minn., the only Democrat holding a national office to challenge the unpopular prez in this year’s primaries.
Phillips thought he had a shot at pulling off an upset in the first-in-the-nation primary, which takes place on January 23.
Two weeks before the deadline, Phillips leaned up against a government repair truck, got a huge box of Dunkin Donuts coffee to fight off the 22-degree weather, and waited for the voters to do their civic duty.
Nobody came.
At least the congressman kept a sense of humor about the rejection.
“Sometimes when you build it, they don’t come,” Phillips told reporters, paraphrasing the most famous quotation from the movie Field of Dreams.
“Sometimes if you build it, they don’t come,” Dean Phillips told reporters outside of the Manchester DoubleTree hotel this morning, after no voters showed up to his “Government Repair Truck Coffee Conversations” event in 22 degree weather. pic.twitter.com/x0lpVcRSnb
— jake rosen (@JakeMRosen) January 9, 2024
That’s a huge slap in the face for Phillips for two reasons. First, New Hampshire—and Iowa—voters pride themselves on meeting the presidential candidates personally. They want to meet them, shake their hands, and understand who they are over multiple meetings.
When New Hampshire voters bail on you, it’s bad news.
To make matters worse, the man Phillips is running against—Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.—isn’t even on the ballot.
The Democratic Party decided to replace Iowa and New Hampshire with more “diverse” states of Nevada and South Carolina…and when New Hampshire followed state law that it hold the earliest primary election, Joe Biden boycotted.
Soon, aides to the president began panicking that Phillips could make an embarrassingly strong showing and launched a write-in campaign for Biden.
It looks like they didn’t need to be concerned.
A poll from Saint Anselm College shows Biden 40 points ahead of Phillips, even without having a full-fledged campaign: Biden wins 50 percent of the vote; Phillips gets 10 percent—who were all busy on Tuesday—and Marianne Williamson ranks third with seven percent.
Dean Phillips just can’t crack the Granite State.
In the unique logic of politics, one Republican political operative blamed the problem on…another Republican political operative.
“This was all so predictable. But Steve Schmidt wanted to get paid,” said Matt Mackowiak. Schmidt, a former John McCain/NeverTrump Republican helped found the Lincoln Project, which even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called a scam.
This was all so predictable.
But Steve Schmidt wanted to get paid. https://t.co/WMSNhUpP6J
— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) January 9, 2024
Ironically, Dean Phillips is so far behind, he may end up helping Donald Trump in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire has an “open primary,” where anyone—including independents and Democrats—can vote in the Republican primary.
Politico noted that Nikki Haley — and, until he pulled the plug on his race, Chris Christie — banked their political futures on appealing to these voters. Phillips might siphon off enough to help Trump have a commanding lead in the Republican primaries.
Phillips could also fudge the math in his home state of Minnesota, a state Democrats won in 2016 and 2020 by razor-thin margins. Polls show the same thing playing out again this year…but if enough people listen to Phillips’ criticism, they may decide to stay home and hand the state to the Republican Party.
If Phillips isn’t exactly an electric personality, at least he’s tapping into an enormous number of discontented Democratic voters.
Four out of every 10 Democrats told pollsters that they believe Joe Biden shouldn’t run for reelection… last month. The overwhelming majority of Democrats who would prefer a different candidate mostly cited concerns about the 81-year-old president’s age, according to the CBS News poll.
The party doesn’t want anyone like the 46th president at the top of their ticket in November: Two-thirds of skeptical Democrats want their next presidential candidate to be “different from Biden.”
Biden’s unpopularity extends way beyond his party: 56 percent of Americans say they would be “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied to have Biden run for president again this year.
America’s indifference or hostility to Biden may explain why the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign has chosen to focus its first ad buy of this election year harping on Jan. 6 and calling President Donald Trump a threat to democracy.
The Left is also desperately trying to convict President Trump of something—anything—that will let them disqualify him from state ballots this November.
And—lo and behold—Dean Phillips has just been smacked with an ethics complaint that his campaign is illegally coordinating with a super PAC.
Dean Phillips is in trouble…but what happened to him this week may happen to Joe Biden in a few months.
It may be that the most committed member of the Biden-Harris election team is the D.A. indicting and persecuting his opponents instead of giving Americans a free and fair vote over who leads their country.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”