While Donald Trump and Nikki Haley might draw focus, a shadow presidential primary is taking place in New Hampshire, where Joe Biden could stumble at the first hurdle of his bid to run for president again in 2024 following an internal Democratic party feud.
As a consequence of the party scrap, Biden’s name will not even appear on the ballot in the Granite state on Tuesday. While the president remains the favorite to win his party’s overall nomination, his absence here has opened a window for Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020, to mount longshot presidential bids.
The pair have spent weeks campaigning in the state, pitching different visions for the future. Phillips, 55, has touted his reputation as a centrist; his record of working with Republicans to get things done; and the fact that he is 26 years younger than Biden.
Williamson, who withdrew from the 2020 race before the Iowa caucuses, is selling more of a deviation from the current administration. A progressive, she would introduce free college tuition, declare a climate emergency and “Department of Peace” which would be tasked with avoiding war abroad and tackling white supremacy at home.
So far it is Phillips who seems to be drawing the most attention from Granite staters, even if, as he told voters in Salem on Friday, challenging Biden has meant being “excommunicated” from the wider Democratic party.
“I was a darling as of 90 days ago, and now I’m the devil somehow,” Phillips told the Guardian after the event.
“But that’s how it works. I expected this because it is a nonsensical culture, of standing in line playing your role waiting your turn. We can’t do that if we hope to save this country.”
Phillips, who ran his family’s hundred million dollar brewing company before winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 2018, only launched his campaign in October 2023, but he has established a large political operation in the state.
At his events his volunteers scurry around gathering signatures from people in the crowd, and hand out T-shirts and buttons with the legend: “I like Dean” written on the front. Frequently the crowds are large.
An event in Nashua on Saturday, a bitterly cold day with wispy snow falling from the sky, drew more than 200 people, who heard Phillips tout his record as “the second most bipartisan” Democrat in the House of Representatives.
“We believe it is time to segregate the far-left and the far-right and give voice to the exhausted majority of America. Are you ready for that?” Phillips said, to applause.
A man who clearly has a passion for language, Phillips then addressed a Democratic effort to write-in Biden’s name on the ballot on Tuesday by suggesting: “If he wrote you off, why would you write him in,” and claimed that Biden “took the granite state for gran-ted”.
On the stump Phillips sometimes adds: “I did torpedo my career in Congress, so that this country will not be torpedoed by this nonsense.”
New Hampshire polling shows Biden with a commanding lead over Phillips, and an even more commanding lead over Williamson. But given Biden’s name isn’t on the ballot, there’s a possibility Phillips could win.
The unusual situation stems from the Democratic national committee’s decision to ditch decades of tradition this year in choosing South Carolina, a much more racially diverse state, to host the first presidential primary. When New Hampshire said it would host its primary first anyway – South Carolina will vote next week – the Democratic National Committee essentially said it would ignore the state’s results.
It means that Phillips’s and Williamson’s efforts here won’t actually help them become a presidential candidate, but that doesn’t render the time they spend here completely redundant, said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.
“New Hampshire historically has not been about delegates, because we have relatively few to offer in the big scheme of things,” Scala said.
“It’s about the publicity that comes with a victory or even a better-than-expected performance in an early voting state in the nomination process, and I think they’ve been following that playbook.”
Biden might be absent from the state, but a movement has emerged encouraging people to write his name on voting slips, and in a sign that the Biden campaign sees the potential for embarrassment, a series of high-profile Biden supporters have been dispatched to New Hampshire in recent weeks.
Ro Khanna, a rising Democratic congressman from California, held an event for Biden on Saturday, while Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, is among a slew of Biden’s cabinet officials who have pitched up here since the start of December.
Another problem for Phillips and Williamson is a liberal-led effort to get independent New Hampshirites to vote for Haley in the Republican primary, in an attempt to damage Trump’s chances in the state. PrimaryPivot, the organization running the campaign, has been a regular presence at Republican events.
“There’s a difference between a regular conservative Republican and someone who is an autocrat,” said Robert Schwarz, co-founder of PrimaryPivot.
“For the issues most important to our democracy, Nikki Haley and Donald Trump are night and day.”
For Phillips and Williamson, the write-in Biden campaign, and a separate effort to write-in “ceasefire” on Democratic ballots to critique Biden’s handling of Israel’s actions in Gaza, is an unwanted distraction.
“President Biden doesn’t really care about a write-in campaign. The president would care if a candidate, such as myself, who has called for a ceasefire from the very beginning, got a lot of votes,” Williamson said at a campaign event in Manchester on Saturday.
“I find [the campaign] kind of self-indulgent, performative.”
Williamson, who after dropping out of the 2020 race endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, has a much broader critique of the US than Phillips. Political elites, Williamson said, have a “business model” of “job elimination, and worker exploitation, and demonization of unions, and tax cuts for the very, very wealthy”.
“A majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The majority of Americans can’t even dream of homeownership at this point. A majority of Americans cannot afford to absorb a $500 unexpected expenditure. One in four Americans live with medical debt, 75 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured,” Williamson said.
She has found some support among people like Lisa Swanson, a student at Quinnipiac university who voted for Sanders four years ago. Speaking after the Manchester event, Swanson said she found Williamson “very reasonable”.
“She shares a lot of the beliefs that I’ve had for a very long time, as if she’s plucked them right out of my own brain. So that’s very refreshing,” Swanson said.
But while the campaigns of Williamson and Phillips might be winning support, there is still a sense that this could all be for naught. Neither is expected to seriously challenge Biden in South Carolina primary, let alone in the states to follow.
Like others who attended events for these rebel candidates, Swanson was angry at the Democratic party skipping their state.
“I feel like it’s pretty anti-democratic, quite frankly. It is the opposite of democracy. We are supposed to vote as the people to show what we want, and the DNC doing that with Joe Biden, quite frankly, says that they don’t trust the people to make a decision,” Swanson said.
