Dean Phillips’ dopey presidential campaign may be over before it started

| 8:00 pm EST November 7, 2023
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When it comes to the re-election of an incumbent president, there’s rarely a serious primary challenge that the president in question faces from within their own party. It’s incredibly difficult for a number of reasons to beat an incumbent – namely that fundraising and staff that support your views will be difficult to find. People don’t want to vote for you – much less invest in you – if they don’t believe you can win.

This is why Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr.’s campaigns both cratered early and don’t have much chance of growing. Enter Dean Phillips, a rep you’ve probably never heard of if you’re not from Minnesota, who’s running to Biden’s right in some ways – with just a few generic promises about “making America more affordable” without really going into much discussion of how he plans to do that. For all of these reasons, he’s polling even worse than Marianne Williamson, who’s about as relevant as she was back in 2019 when she first ran for president. Oh, and she’s also polling in single digits.

Now Dean Phillips has a whole new problem: It turns out that he probably won’t even make much money off the whole scheme of running for president. Phillips hasn’t had much trouble getting former Republican campaign strategists to work for him, or Republican donors to give to his campaign in hopes of throwing the election to Trump.

However, when it comes to finding donors within his own party, he’s already losing the ones who contributed to his re-election campaigns as a congressman in Minnesota, with the state’s party chair asserting that not a single donor in the state thinks Phillips’ campaign has a future – and this is the easy part. It gets a whole lot harder when your campaign gets media attention and you have your own scandals to deal with. Phillips’ campaign may be over before it even gets off the ground.