Painful Way to Kill Your Political Career, Dean

Oh, while I was surviving MegaCon yesterday, apparently the Democratic Party officially started their Presidential primarying in South Carolina, with incumbent Joe Biden stomping hard on his primary opponents with 95 percent of the vote across the entire state (via Asma Khalid at NPR):

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, according to The Associated Press. It is the first official nominating contest for the party, and one that Democrats hope sends a message to Black voters.

As the incumbent president, Biden had been widely expected to carry the primary. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson were also on the ballot...

The Democrats are changing up the order of primaries this cycle, trying to shift away from the small populated states like Iowa and New Hampshire that also don't display the demographic diversity of the party itself. South Carolina isn't a major population state like California, New York, or Illinois - Democratic-leaning states - but it's big enough to matter.

Unwilling to play by the new rules, New Hampshire still held an unsanctioned primary last month allowing write-ins to happen for the Democrats while the Republicans held theirs officially. Biden STILL cleaned up there without campaigning a single day there while his opponents Williamson - you might remember her from last time - and Phillips showed up and begged for votes. 

You might notice I haven't run a Character profile - based on Professor Barber's work - on Dean Phillips even though he threw his hat into the Democratic primaries months ago: Mostly because I viewed Phillips attempts to kneecap the incumbent candidate Biden was doomed to failure. In the modern era of presidential elections - I would say turn of the 20th Century with McKinely (not Teddy!) - there hasn't been a successful challenge against a first-term President within the party. Teddy Roosevelt tried to against his successor Taft but failed (running third-party instead). Truman and LBJ technically quit their campaigns for re-election when they saw the writing on the wall, so we can't be certain how those would have turned out. Thing is, Phillips was in no position - he was a literal unknown backbencher congresscritter with no national profile; he lacks the natural charisma any challenger needs to prevail; and Gods know what he was actually campaigning for - to challenge a well-known relatively popular figure like Biden who isn't quitting any time soon. 

If I can quote from Tori Otten at New Republic:

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions...

Phillips then tried to point to the 2016 Electoral College map which shows a lot of Republican Red. But he erred by thinking geography matters instead of actual population density: Online critics hit Phillips by pointing out the Democratic Blue places on the map have more people who actually matter ("Land doesn't vote, people do!")

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”

I exaggerated a bit earlier when I said nobody know what Phillips is campaigning for: He's actually campaigning on the belief that Biden is old, and that Biden's too unpopular to both the Democratic voting base and the independent voters overall.

Depending on which poll you're looking at, Biden's popularity isn't as healthy as it ought to be - considering the positive economic news Biden keeps generating over the past year thanks to his Infrastructure Bill efforts - but then again polls this far out from November are unpredictable as hell.

And regarding Biden's popularity with the Democratic voting base, those massive wins in New Hampshire (unofficially) and South Carolina - where Williamson beat out Phillips by a percent - ought to bury that particular narrative right quick.

Democratic voters will support their incumbent candidate, especially considering how Biden seems to be the only candidate who can keep donald trump at bay. It's likely - again, no guarantees - that the Indy voters who turned out against trump in 2020 will do so again in 2024 and vote for Joe. Phillips is essentially committing political suicide doing all this.

How Phillips got talked into thinking he could be a savior candidate to outduel Biden and then defeat trump remains a scandal of its own. Approached by a "political strategist" in Steve Schmidt, a campaign advisor most famous for talking John McCain into taking Sarah Palin as his Veep running mate, who claims he's "worried" about Dems relying on an aging President Biden (as though trump is any healthier three years younger and clearly more physically and mentally unfit). You have to look at who's paying Schmidt - deep-pocket "technocrat" billionaires worried about their tax cuts and Biden's pro-union stances - to get an idea of who's really worried about 2024 (and who they really want to win, which is trump). Schmidt basically went fishing for an egocentric millionaire among the Democratic ranks to be the stalking horse to weaken Biden's standing within the party itself.

Good news is, that's not working.

Bad news is, we're getting a clearer picture of how the real Political Establishment - not just the deep-pocket billionaires paying for everything, but also the "expert consultant" class and the upper-income media punditry - don't view trump as the dictatorial, openly destructive force that he is.

Gods help us. This 2024 election is going to be a war, with disinformation coming from every media outlet "convinced" that Biden can't win... even though Biden is winning the primaries and proving his popularity with actual voters with barely a finger lifted.

Get out the vote, America. Support Biden. Stop trump (and his billionaire buddies).

And let Dean Phillips crawl back to some state college on a guest lecturer gig for the rest of his life. His political career is toast. If he thinks he can make a comeback in 2028 based on his dismal performance this year, he's more delusional that trump.