Rep. Dean Phillips, the three-term Minnesota Congressman whose quixotic campaign to unseat a sitting president, is trailing Joe Biden by about 70 points nationally.
But polling numbers mean very little to Phillips at this point. His campaign is about exploiting the dissatisfaction of Democrats and Republicans with the coming rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Either that, or he's the ghoul on the sidelines hovering over Biden, waiting for his collapse.
Either way, it's the longest of long shots. So Phillips has no chance whatsoever and his entire effort is an exercise in vanity, right?
Not entirely, although nothing so strange and unusual has ever happened before. The fact is that 2024 will be a race with many precedents broken and set. There's no reason to think it's impossible that Phillips can't shock the world.
Let's start with New Hampshire. There are several reasons why Phillips isn't going to lose to Biden by 70 points and may even come close enough to Biden to throw a scare into him.
Harry Truman lost to Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver in 1952 after which he promptly withdrew from the race. Another politician from Minnesota, Senator Eugene McCarthy, shocked the world in 1968 with his 42% showing the Granite State, driving Lyndon Johnson from the race.
And while it's very unlikely, Joe Biden is set for a fall in Ne Hampshire because of several different reasons.
First, Biden isn't even on the ballot. The Democratic National Committee is punishing New Hampshire for holding a primary before Biden's choice for the first in the nation Democratic contest in South Carolina next month. The choice is payback for Rep. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina congressman who saved Biden's bacon in the 2020 presidential race.
New Hampshire voters have a streak of independence a mile wide. What do you suppose their reaction is to Biden taking away their beloved first in the nation primary?
Many Democratic activists are angry and upset as well. What better way to signal their displeasure than to vote for Phillips instead of writing Biden's name in?
Then there's the idiosyncrasies of the New Hampshire primary. There are more independents than registered Democrats or Republicans. And there's a huge number of undecideds.
And those polls cannot capture one of the most idiosyncratic dynamics of New Hampshire, which is that A) there are more undeclared voters (343,300) than either Republicans (268,000) or Democrats (262,000), and B) they can decide at the polling booth which party's primary they'd like to crash.
It is true that last-minute deciders could break for the boring old guy who insulted their state and is nowhere to be found on local airwaves or at pancake breakfasts. But does that really sound like New Hampshire?
No, it doesn't. This is a prime example of why we can't get rid of the Electoral College. There would no longer be state primaries. There won't be a need for them. All that would be necessary would be one national primary and a much-diminished convention.
Finally, Reason's editor at large Matt Welch points out that the potential for craziness and weirdness in 2024 is just too great to dismiss.
The 2024 presidential election just has too much weird anti-rematch energy to NOT get expressed at some point. Joe Biden's approval rating, Gallup noted last month, is "worse than other modern presidents at [the] same point." The polling gap between Americans describing themselves as "dissatisfied" and "satisfied" has been wider than 50 percentage points since August 2021. Independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is polling higher than any nontraditional presidential candidate since Ross Perot. No Labels (whose congressional Problem-Solving Caucus Dean Phillips was a co-founder of) is cracking its knuckles on the sidelines.
If Biden fails to get 50% of the vote, we might hear some stirrings in California and the vice president's house. Otherwise, it's just one more political fantasy to believe Phillips has any shot, right?
Right?
