Representative and Democratic candidate Dean Phillips announced this Wednesday he is backing out of the presidential race. The Minnesota congressman assured that he will support Joe Biden to prevent former President Donald Trump from returning to office.
I ran for Congress in 2018 to resist Donald Trump, I was trapped in the Capitol in 2021 because of Donald Trump, and I ran for President in 2024 to resist Donald Trump again - because Americans were demanding an alternative, and democracy demands options. But it is clear that alternative is not me. And it is clear that Joe Biden is our candidate and our opportunity to demonstrate what type of country America is and intends to be.
In 2011, I hosted then VP Biden at my home. Most notable was his empathy and kindness to my daughters and the catering staff, with whom he sat and had ice cream (surprise-surprise). His decency and wisdom were rarities in politics then, and even more so today.
Over a decade… pic.twitter.com/CN19pFqitE
— Dean Phillips (@deanbphillips) March 6, 2024
He announced that he was dropping out of the race minutes before he posted on X a radio interview in Minnesota for "The Chad Hartman Show" on WCCO. He announced that he would support Biden: "I'm going to suspend my campaign and I will be, right now, endorsing President Biden because the choices are so clear."
Age, the reason Dean Phillips alluded to for running for the Democratic nomination
This message couldn't be any more different from the one he posted a few days earlier. On Saturday, NBC News reported that during an event in Nashua, the then-Democratic candidate claimed that Biden should retire, mainly due to his age. He stated that Trump should not run either, for the same reason:
We all know Joe Biden is a good man. I respect him. But he should have passed the torch. He should not be running again. His age, yes, his stage of life. He’s in decline. We have very serious problems, costs, chaos, challenges facing this country in this world that I think are awfully difficult for either of these two men to address.
A day later, during a campaign event in Rochester, Phillips again alluded to Biden's age ensuring that he should be the one to win the nomination for the general election next November: "Joe Biden has no relationships with this generation of new newly elected members of Congress. He hasn’t been in the Senate for many, many years."
However, his statements were of little use. During Super Tuesday, he did not obtain any delegates from the states that voted while Joe Biden won 1,506 delegates.
