Joe Gets A New Primary Opponent

I'm having a hard time getting my head around this exercise:

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) announced Thursday he is running for president against President Biden.

The congressman confirmed he would be running against Biden in the Democratic primary, after previously signaling he would not do so.

. . . The Minnesota Democrat has repeatedly called for a competitive primary instead of Biden running unopposed for the nomination.

“I think President Biden has done a spectacular job for our country. But it’s not about the past,” Phillips said. “This is an election about the future.”

According to Red State,

[W]hat makes this especially interesting is who is reportedly behind the campaign. According to another report, The Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, infamous for his late-night online meltdowns, is advising Phillips.

. . . If Schmidt is the driving force behind Phillips' campaign, that's not a good sign for anyone involved. I wouldn't trust a co-founder of The Lincoln Project to win a race for dog catcher.

Still, Phillips' bid could cause issues for Biden because he's looking to drive a wedge through the primary process. New Hampshire Democrats lost their first-in-the-nation primary status after Biden and the DNC colluded to put South Carolina first in line, the very state that helped save Biden's then-collapsing campaign in 2020. Where is Phillips' centering his campaign? In New Hampshire.

So far, it looks to me as if the "primary process" is completely irrelevant to either party this year. Biden clearly wants to bypass New Hampshire, simply because he didn't do well there in 2020 and had to rely on South Carolina to save his campaign -- so naturally, he's going to take any suspense out of the 2024 race by putting South Carolina first. I don't see how a no-name guy running against Joe in New Hampshire will change anything.

It's also significant that Robert Kennedy Jr gave up on the idea of challenging Joe in primaries as a Democrat pretty early in the process.

On September 29, 2023, Mediaite reported that Kennedy was reorienting his campaign to run as an independent rather than as a Democrat. On October 9, 2023, he confirmed these reports by formally announcing that he will be continuing his presidential bid as an independent candidate.

. . . Prior to the switch Kennedy and his campaign manager had expressed dissatisfaction with the Democratic primary election process.

Acccusations that the Democrat National Committee rigs the primary process are nothing new; Bernie Sanders supporters made the same claim in 2016.

There’s always a learning curve, and my experience during the 2016 Democratic Primary educated me on the down-and-dirty politics behind an election.

People seem to be under the impression that high-level political corruption is only something you see in a movie or show like House of Cards. Perhaps the idea that the most powerful people in the country would cheat us out of our sacred practice of democracy strikes fear in the hearts of those of us who’ve trusted in this system for so long. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that not only does the DNC rig its primaries against independent-minded outsider candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang & others, but that process is much more intricate and complex than one might imagine.

I think we can take it as given that the Democrat establishment doesn't want a primary process in 2024. Even if Joe drops out, which I think may be more likely than some believe, he'll delay the announcement until sometime in late spring or even summer to bypass any serious primary opposition. I think this is the real reason for Gavin Newsom's quasi-non-campaign: he avoids any imputation of disloyalty while also forestalling any serious primary electoral challenge to his implicit front-runner status, which he's actively cultivating with Nancy Pelosi's tacit approval.

After all, this has been Trump's 2024 primary strategy as well: avoid giving any potential opponent the opportunity to place himself on an equal platform by allowing debate. But for the Democrats, this strategy allows a late spring or summer bait-and-switch whereby Biden withdraws in favor of the preselected Newsom. And as I said the other day, this will also allow them to keep Kamala as the vice president while removing the risk of an octogenarian at the head of the ticket.

This still leaves me with the question of why Rep Phillips is undertaking this exercise, which Bernie veterans and other Democrat insiders must recognize is foreordained to failure.