New Hampshire
Joe Biden likes to say that ‘democracy is on the ballot’ in 2024. Yet Joe Biden was not on the ballot on Tuesday in New Hampshire. In his absence, a 55-year-old former congressman called Dean Phillips, who started his campaign just ten weeks ago, won 20 per cent of the vote.
Biden still won easily as more than 65 per cent of Democratic voters wrote his name in. But the President’s ducking of New Hampshire, and Phillips’s sudden emergence, says a lot about the sorry state of Democratic politics and the gnawing fear that Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in November.
Dean Phillips’s hair is coiffed, his suits shine and he talks as if he’s the sweetest man in America
The re-nomination of a commander-in-chief is usually little more than a formality. Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to step aside in 1968 after losing to Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, but the last time an elected sitting first-term president was not his party’s candidate was in 1856, when president Franklin Pierce was brushed aside for James Buchanan.
There’s nothing normal about Biden’s presidency, however. Last year, at his behest, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced a major shake-up of its primary system, stripping New Hampshire of its ‘first-in-the-nation’ status and making South Carolina the opening primary. The official reason was that South Carolina is more racially diverse and more representative of the nation. The truth is that the Democratic leadership knows Biden is unpopular and potentially vulnerable to a challenge.
New Hampshire rejected the DNC’s change, insisting it would hold its primary before anyone else and citing a clause in its state law which compelled it to do so. The DNC responded by ruling that New Hampshire’s vote would not count and ordered presidential candidates to ‘take all steps possible not to participate’.
Could Dean Phillips be President?
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25.01.2024
New Hampshire
Joe Biden likes to say that ‘democracy is on the ballot’ in 2024. Yet Joe Biden was not on the ballot on Tuesday in New Hampshire. In his absence, a 55-year-old former congressman called Dean Phillips, who started his campaign just ten weeks ago, won 20 per cent of the vote.
Biden still won easily as more than 65 per cent of Democratic voters wrote his name in. But the President’s ducking of New Hampshire, and Phillips’s sudden emergence,........
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