President Joe Biden dealt challenger Dean Phillips a Super Tuesday defeat in the Minnesota congressman’s home state.
Now Phillips has decided he is stepping out of the race and will throw his support behind the president. In an exclusive interview with Chad Hartman on WCCO Radio, Phillips made the announcement Wednesday afternoon.
"People have registered their opinion - and that is why today, a year-and-a-half later, I am going to suspend my campaign, and I will be, right now, endorsing President Biden," says Phillips. "And while, indeed, I think the president is at a stage in life where his capacities are diminished, he is still a man of competency and decency and integrity, and the alternative, Donald Trump, is a very dangerous, dangerous man.”
Phillips adds he will do everything possible to ensure Biden's re-election, saying that former President Donald Trump is "dangerous", but he did say he thinks Trump is better positioned to win the General Election at this time.
"While I surely had hoped and expected this endeavor to generate more of a return, more joy, more hopefulness, and while disappointing I'm not here to litigate what went wrong. I'm not angry at anybody, I'm here to celebrate those who voted on Primary Day," said Phillips. "Participation is the most important word in our vocabulary in America today."
Phillips says he was glad to see there was a lot of common ground in the different groups of people he met with, and expressed hope for a country that has clearly become sharply divided and he has no regrets about his campaign, but he thinks reform needs to happen.
"I think we need to look at gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, we need to look at ways to incentivize voters to participate, make voting easier. We also need to incentivize ways to encourage candidates to more invitational and less confrontational," Phillips says.
As for Phillips' future, he says he is done seeking public office where he has spent three terms representing Minnesota's Third Congressional District. He also endorsed Democrat Kelly Morrison who is running to replace Phillips.
For Phillips, the only elected Democrat to challenge Biden in their party’s primary, the results from Minnesota and other Super Tuesday states extended his string of defeats.
“While Democratic Party loyalists are clearly, consistently, and overwhelmingly registering their preference for Joe Biden, it doesn’t alter the reality which compelled me to enter the race in the first place; Donald Trump is increasingly likely to defeat him in November,” Phillips said in a statement. “I’ll be assessing tonight’s results and all available data over the coming days before making a decision about how I can best help prevent that tragedy.”
On the GOP side, former President Donald Trump beat Nikki Haley in the state’s Republican primary. Haley later announced she was withdrawing from the race setting up a Biden-Trump rematch.
Minnesota has 75 Democratic and 39 Republican national convention delegates. But as one of the smaller of 16 states and one territory holding Super Tuesday primaries, Minnesota received little attention — even from Phillips, who represents a congressional district in the Minneapolis suburbs but enjoyed hardly any home-field advantage.
Phillips told Hartman on WCCO Radio he still hopes Nikki Haley decides to run as an independent.
"I do hope Nikki Haley maybe considers an independent bid," says Phillips. "I want to see a person of decency and integrity in the White House. That is the most important issue right now. And Donald Trump is a threat to all of the values and principals that we hold dear."
He says there is only one choice right now, and that's Joe Biden. But he also said there are clear issues with his age.
"Would I rather have a man of Joe Biden's age, who is facing the decline we all go through, versus a man just a few years younger than he, who is to me a clear and present danger? It's a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer," said Phillips.
Haley was the only candidate to put in an in-person campaign appearance. Her rally at a Bloomington hotel last week drew several hundred people, but it wasn’t enough for her to catch up to Trump.
The Biden campaign last week sent Doug Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband. Emhoff appeared at a fundraiser, visited Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to highlight the administration’s investments in transportation infrastructure, and paid his respects to three slain first responders in Burnsville.
Speaking to WCCO Radio's Adam and Jordana on Tuesday, Emhoff touted the president's record on the economy even though so many Americans say they aren't feeling it.
"Those numbers are jamming, I've been all over the country, in the Twin Cities, you can feel it, you can feel the energy, you see the cranes, the construction projects, you see it in the data," Emhoff said. "The economic data, the job growth has been historic."
Trump didn’t visit Minnesota for the primary, but he raised eyebrows during a phone interview with KNSI radio in St. Cloud on Monday when he claimed that he thought he won the state in the 2020 general election, echoing his false claims that he was the rightful winner nationwide.
Trump actually lost Minnesota by more than 7 percentage points to Biden, but he came within 1.5 points of defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and told KNSI he intends to take a “big shot” at winning the state this November. No Republican presidential candidate has carried Minnesota since Richard Nixon in 1972.