Dean Phillips, an affable congressman from Minnesota who mounted a quixotic challenge to the sitting president of his own party, predicated his presidential campaign on one thing: Joe Biden can’t win. His case was bolstered by the polling, which has consistently shown that members of the president’s own party are deeply dissatisfied with his performance. That proposition was put to the test in New Hampshire. But despite the bizarre nature of the contest, which resulted in Biden’s name not appearing on the ballot, Democrats demonstrated that Phillips’s premise was wrong.
When Phillips embarked on his romantic bid to unseat Biden, his campaign set expectations for his performance in New Hampshire high but not so high that they were wholly unreasonable. “The Phillips campaign has set 42 percent as a barometer for success, according to one of his advisers,” Politico reported earlier this month. But as the race neared, Phillips lowered expectations. “He’s been saying he’d be happy just to finish in the 20 percent range, considering he just started his campaign in late October and is relatively unknown on the national stage,” one Minnesota-based reporter wrote on the eve of the Granite State primary. That’s just about what he got.
As of this writing, Phillips has won more than 22,000 votes, securing the support of just shy of 20 percent of the 116,000 Democrats who turned out on Tuesday night. The percentage will likely decline as the votes are counted, but the raw vote total alone is still remarkable. Whether it is attributable to the bad blood the Democratic National Committee engendered among Granite Staters by attempting to strip New Hampshire of its first-in-the-nation status or general dissatisfaction with Biden, one-fifth of Democrats voting against their party’s incumbent president is impressive by any historical standard. Phillips had hoped that kind of performance “would amplify his message about Biden’s weakness.” And yet, his performance has not sent any perceptible message to the White House. Why? Because Biden’s victory in a contest in which he refused to compete was more impressive.
In an uncompetitive Democratic race that would award the winner no delegates, and despite the competitiveness on the Republican side that attracted the participation of a large number of crossover voters, more than 120,000 voters came out for the Democratic primary. That’s roughly double the number of New Hampshirites who had participated in the primary in 2012, in which Barack Obama won just over 80 percent of the vote. As a write-in candidate in 2024, Biden received at least 64,000 votes, with another 12,000 or so ballots yet to be processed.
If Phillips’s attempt to embarrass Biden by mobilizing Democratic moderates failed, so too did an effort to humiliate him from his left. Ahead of yesterday’s vote, progressives who are so pro-Palestinian — wink, wink — that they cannot abide Israel’s right to self-defense tried to mobilize support for an effort to write in “ceasefire” as a candidate. They printed yard signs, organized sad rallies outside their representatives’ district offices, and generated publicity wholly disproportionate to their numbers. In the end, the “ceasefire” campaign embarrassed only itself. Even in reliably progressive municipalities and college towns, “ceasefire” struggled to crack 1 percent of the vote.
According to a Fox News voter analysis of the Democratic electorate in New Hampshire, the voters who turned out are representative of an electorate that should be as unenthusiastic about Biden as his moribund job-approval numbers would suggest. Ninety-five percent of its participants identify as Democratic. Just 23 percent call themselves “moderate,” while 74 percent described themselves as either “somewhat” or “very liberal.” Half of primary participants were not college-educated. The other half said they were degree-holders. But when push came to shove last night, most voters gave Biden high marks.
Seventy-four percent approve of the job Biden has done in office, roughly in line with Biden’s job-approval numbers among adults who identify as Democrats nationally. Just 80 percent approve of his handling of the economy, and only a bare majority said that he was not too old to serve out a second term. But regardless of their level of satisfaction with Biden’s renomination to the presidency, 87 percent said they would “ultimately vote for him” in November. That alone is enough to fill the White House’s sails — at least insofar as it contrasts with New Hampshire Republicans, among whom somewhere between 19 and 35 percent said they will not pull the lever for Donald Trump in the fall.
Granted, the Republican primary provided Democrats who disapprove of Biden’s performance in office with an alternative venue to register their disapproval with the president. But those voters likely participated in that contest only to lodge their dissatisfaction with Donald Trump, who is all but certain to emerge as the Republican nominee in the summer. The modest support Trump received from crossover voters yesterday might make or break a close race, but the 2020 election in the Granite State was not close. It’s reasonable to conclude that a rerun of that contest will yield similar results.
“We should have a thoughtful competition,” Phillips told CNN’s Kasie Hunt, “because Biden is going to lose.” As a theoretical proposition, Phillips’s admonition could not be summarily dismissed. But as a practical matter, given the results in New Hampshire, that argument is harder to make today than it was yesterday. If the president can count on the level of party unity he enjoyed in the Granite State despite all the unique variables that should have made it a hard road for Biden to hoe, the reelection campaign in Wilmington can breathe a sigh of relief. The proposition that Biden is especially unpopular among Democrats was treated to a real-world test, and it came up short.