Manchester, New Hampshire — “It makes me sick” to criticize President Joe Biden, Rep. Dean Phillips says in a windowless room of his campaign office, lined with “DEAN” posters as a perfect setting for filmed podcasts. “I’ve respected the president my whole life. I’ve had him in my home. … He helped save the country in 2020.”

Criticizing Biden, however, does not make Phillips too sick to refrain. “The way he’s acting now I think is real dangerous, isn’t it? He wouldn’t take my calls to even let him know that I was running. He’s not campaigning. He’s not consenting to debates. He’s not appearing in front of voters. He’s not answering questions. Where is he? And I’m concerned, because he’s going to get embarrassed by Donald Trump.”

That’s the basic thesis of the Minnesota congressman’s primary campaign for president: Voters think Joe Biden is too old and don’t want him to run again — and the polls prove it. “His numbers are horrible,” Phillips said. “He’s 81 years old. His time has passed, and he should have passed the torch.”

Polls of the 2024 presidential election have consistently shown Biden lagging behind Trump in a rematch. Further, a majority of voters have an unfavorable view of the incumbent, and polling data has shown that even Democrats are less than enthusiastic about a Biden reelection bid.

In fact, Phillips insisted that if the polls were better for Biden, he would have never thought of running. “Gosh no,” said the Minnesota Democrat. “But [they’re] not. And that’s why this is so existential in my mind. I’m dumbfounded that the great Democratic Party of which I have been a member and supporter and passionate about for so long is offering a singular candidate who is destined to lose to the most dangerous man in American history.”

As such, the 54-year-old Phillips is running a quixotic primary campaign against his party’s incumbent president.

But as he tilts at an octogenarian windmill, there are three major problems with Phillips’s run.

First, it’s starting in the strangest of settings: Biden will not even appear on the ballot in New Hampshire in a contest that the Democratic National Committee has stripped of delegates.

Second, in modern American history, the most successful primary campaigns against incumbent presidents have been based on policy differences. The efforts to primary Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George H.W. Bush in 1992 were all rooted in the fact that key segments of the primary electorate were disgruntled with the sitting president. In 1968, the issue was the Vietnam War; in 1980, it was inflation and the “malaise” looming over the Carter White House; and in 1992, it was about Bush’s support for increasing taxes during a recession. None of the three were successful, but they spoke to a real political divide.

Phillips’s campaign to primary Joe Biden is different. The three-term representative from suburban Minneapolis is not running as an ideological opponent of the incumbent president. In fact, his congressional voting record shows zero daylight between the two. Instead, he’s making the case that a 27-year age difference is what sets him apart, and why voters should consider him instead of the incumbent. He says it doesn’t even have to be him either.

“If this time 13 months from now, a Democrat is in the White House, I will fulfill my most important mission,” he said. “And I simply believe that I am best positioned of the people in the race right now to be that person. I’m not saying I’m the only one. The whole point is, let’s determine that.”

He added that it could be “Joe Schmo. It could be Marianne Williamson, it could be Joe Biden, it could be me, it could be anyone. It could be names that we all know, it could be names that nobody knows. It could be Michelle Obama, for gosh sakes.”

But as he makes that case here, he’s running into a third problem: Running for president is hard.

The concept of a primary challenge to a vulnerable incumbent makes sense on paper, but the execution is difficult under the best of circumstances. It’s to be expected that the party’s loyalists will criticize you and left-leaning media will snub you. But Phillips is not running in the best of circumstances. Instead, he is mounting a last-minute effort that has sparked little enthusiasm from voters and has struggled to achieve the basic fundamentals of a presidential campaign.

Phillips picked a messy place to stake his primary claim

What makes Phillips’s campaign in New Hampshire unique is that he is not even technically running against Joe Biden.

In 2022, Biden proposed a new presidential primary calendar — quickly rubber-stamped by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — to end New Hampshire’s status as host of the first-in-the-nation primary. Biden bumped New Hampshire’s primary (and Iowa’s caucus, for that matter) from the front of the line. (By contrast, Republicans have kept the traditional primary calendar of the Iowa caucuses followed quickly by New Hampshire).

The Granite State, however, is famously protective of its primary, which it has enshrined in law. Further, with a Republican governor and Republican control of both chambers of the state legislature, there was no appetite to change that law. And so New Hampshire is holding its primary anyway on Tuesday, January 23, thumbing its nose at the national party.

There’s a price for defiance. The national party will award exactly zero delegates based on the vote, turning it into something of a beauty contest whose significance will be measured in, for lack of a better term, vibes.

And because of the primary’s rogue status, Biden’s campaign declined to put him on the ballot. Instead, there is an active write-in effort being mounted on his behalf, led by a number of Democratic stalwarts in the state. As Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, told Vox, “The write-in effort has got the best of the best folks involved in it. So I could not ask for a better team, if I was hoping to get written in.”

As well as competing against the write-in effort, Phillips will share the ballot with nearly two dozen others, including failed 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and Vermin Supreme, a perennial candidate and performance artist best known for wearing a boot as a hat.

Why is Phillips bothering at all, given that nobody will get delegates out of the contest? Because the write-in campaign is simply about shaping the media narrative. It means that Phillips is almost engaging in a form of glorified shadow boxing — particularly when an active Republican primary is drawing the attention of many unaffiliated voters who might otherwise cast a ballot in the Democratic race.

What does success look like in that boxing match? That’s not clear to anyone — including to Team Phillips.

The Phillips campaign has internally suggested that their benchmark is the 42 percent that fellow Minnesotan Eugene McCarthy received when he launched a primary challenge against Lyndon Johnson in 1968. But unlike McCarthy’s grassroots campaign, there is not a groundswell of activists looking to get “clean for Dean.”

Phillips seemed to be tempering expectations for his campaign and setting a high bar for Biden when he spoke to Vox. “Should [Biden] not get 90 percent of the vote, in the first-in-the-nation primary as incumbent president? I would imagine he should.” Barack Obama received only 81 percent of the vote of the state while running unopposed in 2012.

Who is Dean Phillips?

At a Nashua coffeehouse, Dean Phillips made his pitch. It was a tight space where two dozen voters were squeezed in along with reporters and Phillips’s own campaign entourage, including a camera crew. 

He started with a capsule biography of himself as someone orphaned as an infant when his father died in Vietnam and then raised in a wealthy family after his mother remarried. Phillips then detailed starting a business and how he got into electoral politics when he woke up the morning after the 2016 election to his daughter crying about the result and decided he needed to do something.

He also described his disconnection once he arrived in Washington and how distastefully insular and partisan he found both the city and the reluctance of his fellow Democrats to call on Biden not to run again. As he characterized his conversations, “They’re all waiting until 2028. So I say, ‘You can’t wait until 2028. Because we may not have a 2028 if we allow [Trump] back to the White House.’” And then he pivoted to urge voters to back him: “The very state that was disenfranchised by the Democratic National Committee has the opportunity to shove it right back in their face, change democracy forever, and actually change the narrative of this entire campaign,” he said to applause.

Phillips took questions from the audience, which he handled with some practiced skill. When a questioner asked about what he described as his vaccine injury, Phillips deftly pivoted to talk about Medicare-for-all.

But much of what he offered was anti-politics that assailed business as usual in Washington, the lack of bipartisanship and imagination there, and the need for new blood. “As someone who has spent his career building businesses competing against two big brands — most recently Talenti Gelato against Ben and Jerry’s and Häagen Dazs — let me tell you, the Democratic and Republican parties need competition,” he said, decrying how the two parties kept members of Congress busy raising money rather than interacting with each other.

He went on to note of Biden, “When you’re 81 years old, I don’t know how you can have the capacity to start really getting your hands around something so significant as artificial intelligence, let alone Web 3.0 and crypto and blockchain.”

After the town hall ended, Phillips went back to Manchester to appear at a fundraiser for an animal shelter. It was held at a bar on the bottom floor of a converted cotton mill on the banks of the Merrimack River. He spent time behind the bar serving drinks to customers who seemed mildly bemused by the spectacle as his ever-present camera crew tried to capture footage. 

The bar’s owner, Peter Telge, is a supporter of Phillips’s candidacy. He told Vox he thought Biden, whom he supported in the past, was physically “failing.” Telge added, “It’s nothing against him. He’s a good guy. And most of the things he has done are okay, but I’m not really comfortable with him.”

He said of Phillips, “My wife likes him. I like him. Just to be honest, I’m not sure he has a chance, which I think most of the country feels the same way I do. They want to see somebody have a chance. And so they can come up with a lot of stuff in the next six weeks, eight weeks.”

After Phillips’s stint bartending, Telge did his best to give him a chance and took him around introducing him to customers. He introduced the Minnesota congressmember to a clutch of teachers celebrating the start of winter break with drinks. “This gentleman is running for president,” Telge told them. “Hopefully you’ll vote for him.”

“Hey, everybody. I’m Dean Phillips,” said the candidate. “I’m running … I’m a congressman from Minnesota running in the Democratic primary.” When one teacher commented that she had seen one of his television commercials, he replied, “That’s awesome. That someone saw the commercial.” He then touted his record in Congress to them. “I’m a big full funder of IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act], just so you know.” The response was dead silence, though Phillips got some laughs with his follow-up line: “I thought that would get a little more reaction.”

It’s not clear Phillips or his team are ready for prime time

The exchange was an indication of just how far Phillips has to go as a candidate. He had gotten into the race only weeks before this event. He announced only hours before the New Hampshire filing deadline, simply by showing up at the State House surrounded by a posse of national reporters. Phillips’s announcement came late enough in the campaign season that he missed the deadline to file to run in Nevada and was forced to scramble to get on the ballot in a number of other states. 

His campaign was initially helmed by Steve Schmidt, the former John McCain aide turned Never Trumper who left the Lincoln Project amid allegations that he covered up sexual misconduct. Schmidt soon moved over to a campaign super PAC and was replaced at the helm by Jeff Weaver, a former top aide to Bernie Sanders, and by Zach Graumann, a close Andrew Yang confidante.

The Phillips campaign used a Residence Inn in Manchester as a de facto dorm. Staffers gathered for the free continental breakfast and discussed the basics of how New Hampshire worked. One learned that, when it came to the state’s media markets, “It’s not all Boston — there’s WMUR.” (New Hampshire has a single local television station, which is an ABC affiliate. Otherwise, all local television news comes from Boston.) Stray hotel guests got to see Phillips sign petition papers before his campaign film crew as they dined on hotel scrambled eggs and a sole bodyguard watched from across the breakfast nook. In the hotel parking lot, a converted milk truck, which Phillips made a totem of his 2018 congressional race, sat motionless for days. 

The growing pains were apparent when a reporter at the Nashua event asked about an initial pledge made to do 120 town halls in New Hampshire and Phillips’s relative lack of progress toward that goal. He conceded, “I’m gonna tell you, the truth is my first sherpa, if you will, in New Hampshire, who is no longer with the campaign, made that announcement based on John McCain’s 120 town halls,” in reference to Schmidt. “I never stood a chance of doing that in that amount of time. I’ll just be forthright with all of you. That was wrong to announce. There’s no way I could have done it. I’m doing as many as I possibly can. But setting the number was stupid. I own it because it starts and stops with me.”

More signs of struggle were evident during a campaign canvassing operation that consisted of one staffer and one volunteer. It was on the west side of the city, a blue-collar neighborhood with few sidewalks and quite a few triple-decker houses. As the thin twilight of the winter solstice quickly turned into a damp, cold, and cloudy night, a familiar pattern emerged.

Tromping through the cold, the campaign staffer would knock on a voter’s front door and then step 15 feet back, at times almost out of sight of the doorway. Then, with a glance at the phone to create a sense of nonchalance, the staffer would wait for the voter to emerge and tentatively ask their name. The brief acknowledgment would come and the staffer would launch into his pitch.

“Hi, we’ve just been talking to neighbors about Dean Phillips for president. He’s running because most Americans want another option. Seventy-five percent of Americans don’t want the current or the former president to run. And he launched his campaign just a few weeks ago. And he’s already at 15 percent of the polls. Do you have any idea why he might be so popular?” 

Some were befuddled, though there were some bites, particularly once it was mentioned that Phillips supported Medicare-for-all — a policy that he had endorsed hours earlier in the pages of Politico, which didn’t seem to be a publication with a major following in the neighborhood. 

One voter was enthused, citing her positive experience with Medicare. “It’s a fabulous health plan. Yeah, I was on Medicare when I was pregnant. They were phenomenal,” she said as her toddler screamed for her in the background.

One impediment to all of this, though, was that there was no campaign literature. They had run out and were not expecting a fresh shipment for another week. The result was that there was nothing to hand out, and at houses where nobody answered the door, the campaign left no trace at all.

On Wednesday, Congress finally reopened. After more than three weeks without a speaker, the elevation of the previously obscure Mike Johnson of Louisiana to lead the House was a signal that finally the chamber could get back to governing. In the next day, members forced votes next week on two resolutions of censure and one of expulsion. In other words, things aren’t getting less weird anytime soon.

But they won’t be returning to the status quo under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, either. There will now be a new normal as Congress has to deal with pressing issues. The government will shut down at midnight on November 18, Israel and Hamas are at war after the horrific attack Hamas launched on October 7, much of Ukraine is still occupied by Russia, and lawmakers are grappling with how to address the near-record numbers of  undocumented immigrants entering the country.

The House will face this new normal with a weak speaker in a scenario that one veteran Republican insider compared to “Lord of the Flies” after the defenestration spree of the past three weeks that led not only to McCarthy’s ouster but to Republicans electing and then rejecting three speaker-designates in turn. 

Pat Fallon of Texas expressed the hope that Johnson — whom he praised as having “a lot of likability, a lot of authenticity, he is honest, he’s talented”— would be successful. In his view, “if Mike Johnson succeeds, America succeeds. You know, we have a functioning House and a functioning government. We have a divided government, so nobody’s gonna get everything they want. But, you know, we need some conservative wins to make sure that the taxpayers’ money is well accounted for.”

Then again, it could be argued under those circumstances that McCarthy’s debt ceiling deal in the spring was a win, as Republicans won spending caps and permitting reform in exchange for allowing the United States to pay its debts for the next 18 months. The result prompted an immediate right-wing rebellion and set the table for the California Republican’s ultimate downfall earlier in October. 

The challenge for Johnson is that he is going to face one tripwire with his conference even before he’s fully moved into his new office: the matter of Ukraine aid, opposition to which has become a shibboleth for many on the MAGA right. The Biden administration has proposed a major funding bill that would combine aid to Israel and Ukraine as well as funding for border security. 

Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate in the Republican conference, thought Johnson could win support for aid to the European nation from the House despite the widespread opposition from many House Republicans, including Johnson himself. “I think he’s gonna do it,” said Bacon. “But there’s gonna have to be some good take on the border. And I think the president just can’t say, ‘I want X amount of money.’ … He’s got to say why he wants it and make the case.”

However, it seemed likely that, at the very least, the House would separate the aid to each individual US ally rather than combining, as the Biden administration proposed. Johnson told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday, “Our consensus among House Republicans is that we need to bifurcate those issues.”

Johnson insisted that “we’re not going to abandon [Ukraine,] but we have a responsibility, a stewardship responsibility over the precious treasure of the American people, and we have to make sure that the White House is providing the people with some accountability for the dollars.”

Already, he seemed to be getting slightly more breathing room from Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who was the leader of the effort to oust McCarthy and has been an implacable opponent of aid to Ukraine. Gaetz left some wiggle room about whether it should receive a vote, saying, “They should definitely be separate questions. We have a lot of members who want to vote for Ukraine funding. And so that may be a vote that they are able to bring to bear through regular order.” 

However, Gaetz cautioned that because a recent amendment on Ukraine aid did not receive the support of a majority of House Republicans, future legislation on aid to the Eastern European country should not receive any consideration in the House because it violated the Hastert Rule, the recent tradition among House Republicans that all legislation should have the support of “a majority of the majority.” He noted that “the last time Ukraine funding was on the floor of the House … [a] majority of the majority voted against it. That usually ends a measure’s prospects for consideration.”

Yet despite the drama around Ukraine, the fight over government funding is likely to be far less dramatic than past ones. McCarthy’s ouster was the result of his efforts to avoid a government shutdown by simply continuing current funding levels for the next six weeks at the beginning of October. Not only is Johnson enjoying a honeymoon period among his colleagues after the weeks of internecine warfare among House Republicans, he also starts off with fresh credibility among those who were most opposed to McCarthy to keep the government open for at least a few more months. 

As Gaetz, the leader of the hard-right bloc that was opposed to the former speaker, put it, “Kevin McCarthy wanted to govern by continuing resolution to get us to the next continuing resolution. I think Mike Johnson has a lot more credibility [as a] … bridge to single-subject spending bills, not a bridge to just the old ways of Washington.”

But, for whatever criticism that there was of the “old ways of Washington,” at least everyone knew what they were. Everyone was working from the same playbook, and there was at least a basic set of agreed-upon norms. All of that has frayed after the last few chaotic weeks, and the challenges have only grown more complex. It’s a recipe for more weirdness to come.

The vote to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy last week was another clear indicator that the House of Representatives is becoming something un-American. It’s not that the vote inherently undermined national security, nor did it somehow betray the fundamental values that have underpinned the US political system for nearly 250 years. Instead, it was a stranger turn. The vote was downright parliamentary.

It was a de facto no-confidence vote offered by eight dissident Republicans and backed by House Democrats as a bloc. It is not unusual in a parliamentary system for a gang of rebels joining with the opposition to bring down the party leader, but in American politics, it is a foreign concept. 

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with a parliamentary system of government. After all, some of America’s best friends have it. 

But here in the United States, our institutions aren’t designed for this. The Constitution created a system of checks and balances. For centuries, Congress has functioned as a bicameral legislature composed of members of two ideologically diverse parties, where local parochial interests were often of far greater concern than national interest groups.

Further, for generations in Washington, lawmakers guarded their own power, and their chamber’s, against others. That ethos was embodied in the apocryphal quote from a House member, who explained: The other party was simply the opposition, but the Senate was the enemy.

In practice, this led to a politics where political coalitions would come and go depending on individual issues, presidents would openly clash with congressional leaders of their own parties, and the result of congressional votes wasn’t always preordained before the gavel rang down.

That certainly doesn’t ring true anymore. 

Instead, American politics has transformed into a political structure where major legislation can at times be pushed through when the same party controls both chambers of Congress and is typically dictated top down. Party leaders call the shots, and backbench members fall in lockstep behind them. The problem is that the American system of governance is not designed for this, and in recent years, when one party does not have unified control of government, the result is gridlock.

The result is a politics where there is increasing pressure for things to take place speedily along strict party lines in a system designed for slow compromise. These contradictions become increasingly apparent at moments like the present, when control of government is divided and House majorities are narrow, leading to breakdowns like what happened last week. 

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) told Vox that while “we don’t have a parliamentary system, we now have two parties that act like those in parliamentary democracy.” He noted how much parties had shifted over the past century — whereas once they were “ideologically heterodox, which made it much easier to have cross-party voters … you now have almost 100 percent ideological purity on both sides.”

This was echoed by Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, who noted that “the parties have gotten so polarized from one another, we are about as close as we can get to a parliamentary system. He went on to argue that “the House isn’t broken. There’s nothing wrong with it as an institution. The House is a majority body that has traditionally allowed the majority to do whatever they want to do … it’s a party problem.”

Former Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia told Vox that Congress “is continuing to act more like a parliamentary institution than a balance of power structure, with Democrats not acting as minority shareholders but as the opposition.”

He noted that Democrats made the decision to oust McCarthy despite the likelihood of worse policy outcomes in the short term on issues like Ukraine and government funding. Instead, Davis argued that Democrats “made the calculated decision to remove the top Republican fundraiser in McCarthy.” He understood why, though. After all, “the job of the minority is to become a majority.”

Huder argued there were limits to just how much Congress could resemble legislatures in foreign countries. “One of the problems we have in the American system is that we don’t have elections based on parties at all, so we can never have that kind of parliamentary-style accountability.” As he pointed out, “what happened [last] Tuesday was not a no-confidence vote in the way that you would see in a parliamentary election. It didn’t start an election. There is no new governing coalition, and we are sort of stuck. And, in some ways, nothing has changed in the House.”

What’s driving the House’s changing power structure?

The breakdown of parties was already demonstrated earlier this year when 20 Republican rebels forced McCarthy to go through 15 ballots to be elected speaker — even though he had been overwhelmingly ratified as the choice of the GOP conference in a vote two months earlier. Although there had been a trend in recent years where members declined to back their party’s choice for speaker in the formal floor vote, it had not made a difference until January.

As Davis noted, members increasingly come from safe congressional districts where the November general election “is nothing more than a constitutional formality” and are elected by voters who get their news from partisan echo chambers.

Yet the institutions have shifted with the parties. Congressional leaders have become increasingly important and have centralized power, leaving committee chairs and rank-and-file members with far less sway, just as in a parliamentary system where power is concentrated in the hands of the party leader. 

Davis noted that the increasingly parliamentary nature of the House created a self-reinforcing feedback loop. “Leaders have become more powerful, as it is the only way the place can operate,” he said. He noted that if the minority party considers themselves the opposition rather than minority shareholders, then “bills have to be written in the speaker’s office, because the other party is going to put in poison pills” as amendments in the open process that once governed the House in the days before it became not just a majoritarian institution but a top-down one.

What does a more parliamentary House mean for the rest of us?

The result is that Congress has stopped functioning the way it’s nominally supposed to via political science textbooks and Schoolhouse Rock cartoons. The idea of a budget being passed to lay out the framework of 12 different appropriations bills, which then go on to pass both chambers, with any differences being negotiated via conference committee, is as archaic as the spittoons that still sit on the floor of the Senate.

This means that basic government tasks are increasingly pushed off, with Capitol Hill seeing repeated last minute showdowns over funding the government and avoiding a default on the national debt. It also means that bipartisan legislation can face real obstacles, with Republicans relying on what they call the “Hastert Rule,” which requires a majority of the majority party GOP conference to approve any legislation that reaches the floor. This has become an obstacle to Ukraine funding in recent weeks: Skeptics within the GOP have argued that aid to that country no longer has support of the House Republicans, although it still has strong support both in the Senate and nationally.

Instead, the parliamentary nature of the congressional parties, particularly in the House, has simply created greater dysfunction, as, increasingly, major legislation is done in a handful of gargantuan bills. The result is a muddled mess where the type of bipartisan coalitions that once moved major legislation are politically impossible in a polarized environment in which leaders have to build majorities solely from within their caucuses and face political doom when one intraparty faction proves intransigent.

The question is quite how one-sided all of these new norms are. Democrats have been relatively more tractable in recent years than Republicans — although part of that may simply be because Nancy Pelosi eliminated the procedure from the rules of the House when she was speaker. Boyle argued that “being Republican leader means you have a short shelf life. At least on the Republican side, motion to vacate is now a permanent part in which norms have changed in this generation and this is now the new normal. In contrast, he argued on “the Democratic side, it’s very difficult to imagine a situation where anyone would ever utilize” it. 

However, it created a precedent, and there’s no guarantee what House rules might look in the future or how tractable congressional Democrats might be. Speaking Tuesday after the vote to remove McCarthy, Tom Cole (R-OK) wondered what would happen in the future: “Anytime you do something that is unprecedented, you have to worry that it becomes easier in the future. That’s probably something that some of my Democratic friends are pondering right now.”

But that’s not a problem for Hakeem Jeffries now. After all, he’s still just the leader of the opposition.

Mounting a primary challenge to an incumbent president is perhaps the most difficult task in American politics. It’s so difficult that no one has ever successfully done it in modern history. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is almost certainly not going to break that streak.

The environmental lawyer turned vocal anti-vaccine advocate has floundered in the polls since an initial bounce around his April announcement. The Kennedy campaign insists that there’s a way forward for his candidacy, but it’s unclear what that looks like as President Joe Biden’s lead in national polling has grown to over 50 points ahead of his challenger. However, if there is a playbook for primarying an incumbent president, Kennedy isn’t following it.

Bay Buchanan, the campaign manager for her brother Pat Buchanan’s 1992 primary against George H.W. Bush, told Vox that a candidate running against an incumbent president needed four things. 

First, “some segment of that population has to feel they’re forgotten, that they are not represented, and the establishment candidate could care less. That makes them angry enough to take the step to vote against them.” The second is that there needs to be “a two-man race.” The third is that the candidate has to have “an issue or two that appeals. It’s got to be a populist. He’s got to reach out and grab the hearts of those who feel nobody speaks for them.”

At that point, once an insurgent has consolidated those voters as well as the small segment of the electorate who will be voting against an incumbent for temperamental reasons, it’s simply a matter of winning the expectations game. This means doing better than the polls and pundits predict in a key early state like New Hampshire.

Kennedy does not seem well positioned to do this at present: The most recent Emerson poll of the Granite State in early August showed Biden with a 53-point lead over him. However, it is not likely that Biden’s name will be on the ballot in the state, which will force voters to write in the incumbent president. This is because of New Hampshire’s efforts to maintain its first-in-the-nation primary over objections from the Democratic National Committee, which will further diminish the state’s importance.

But, if Kennedy can somehow defy the pundits, that’s where a path to the nomination opens up. “Then you can make the case that you can actually do this, and a lot of people vote for a winner, they want to have a sense that you can win,” Buchanan said. “Even though they like you, they think you’re the best, if you can’t win, they just don’t invest their vote.”

While no incumbent president has lost a primary in the modern era of presidential politics, several have come perilously close. In 1976, Gerald Ford didn’t fend off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan until the convention. In 1980, Sen. Edward Kennedy’s spirited campaign forced incumbent Jimmy Carter into a hotly contested primary, and while Pat Buchanan failed to win a single state against George H.W. Bush in 1992, his strong performance in New Hampshire exposed Bush’s real weaknesses in the general election.

Bob Shrum, a top aide on Edward Kennedy’s 1980 campaign, contrasted the 2024 RFK Jr. campaign with past attempts to mount a challenge to an incumbent. “I think you can make an argument that if Reagan did not pick Schweiker [as his running mate in 1976], he would have been the nominee” instead of Gerald Ford, he said. “And if the hostages [in the US Embassy in Tehran] had not been seized [before] Iowa, creating this kind of vote for Carter to send a message about posture, Kennedy might have prevailed, but those were serious campaigns. This, in my view, is not a serious campaign.”

A successful attempt has to be framed as “a crusade,” not a campaign, and it requires relentless campaigning on the ground, Bay Buchanan said.

That’s not quite what the Kennedy campaign has been doing so far. Party leaders and activists in early states say they’ve heard nothing from the campaign. However, Kennedy campaign manager Dennis Kucinich insisted to Vox that, “We are campaigning vigorously in the first five states … not only New Hampshire and South Carolina, but also Michigan, Iowa, Nevada.” He added at Super Tuesday, in early March 2024, and “delegate-rich states” beyond were also targets. However, Kucinich declined to go into any detail about which voters they were targeting and what type of voters he thought the Kennedy campaign could appeal to. “We’re campaigning everywhere. We’re not ignoring anywhere. And that’s it.”

One thing that makes Kennedy’s campaign different from those in the past is that he has drawn an unusual amount of support from Republicans, who have very positive views of the Democratic presidential hopeful. According to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 55 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of Kennedy, compared to only 28 percent of Democrats. Although Kennedy does resemble a more conventional Democrat on some issues like the environment, he vocally breaks from the consensus within his party on key issues like US support for Ukraine, in addition to his anti-vaccine statements. On these issues, his views resemble those of MAGA Republicans far more than mainstream Democrats.

The main funder of a pro-Kennedy super PAC is Timothy Mellon, a conservative billionaire who has been a strong supporter of Donald Trump. The New Republic recently reported that the Kennedy campaign has an elected GOP state representative on payroll in New Hampshire. Anna Chapman, a longtime Republican operative who has worked on a number of GOP campaigns, describes herself on social media as the South Carolina state coordinator for the Kennedy campaign. Chapman did not respond to a request for comment, nor did a spokesperson for the Kennedy campaign.

Further, at least one veteran Republican operative with high-level experience on multiple presidential campaigns received feelers about interest in working on the Kennedy campaign.

While there are always some crossover voters in primaries, trying to appeal to a significant number of Republicans in a year where Donald Trump is on the ballot facing a vigorous and well-financed field of challengers may not be the most productive strategy. As Buchanan noted, “there’s too much action in our party for them … Republicans are going to be very very focused on choosing their candidates.”

Shrum was even more dismissive and questioned whether there was any strategy behind the Kennedy campaign’s apparent affinity for Republicans. “There’s nothing that screams out that there’s a logic to enlisting all these Republicans and spending all this time with these MAGA Republicans,” he said.

The answer, of course, is that those are the people who will give Kennedy attention. In his April announcement, he spoke for nearly two hours and said, “This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years.” Since his campaign began, he has become a fixture on podcasts and conservative media while only making sparing appearances on the campaign trail. Kennedy is expected to return to New Hampshire in the next week to appear at an event hosted by former Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts (who mounted an unsuccessful Senate bid in New Hampshire in 2014 after moving to the Granite State).  

In an interview last week with Fox News’s Jesse Watters, the longshot candidate bemoaned the fact that he felt that MSNBC and CNN wouldn’t book him to appear on cable television and that Biden would not debate him (no incumbent president has ever debated a primary challenger in American history). The interview took place in New York’s Central Park, not in an early primary state — and Fox News is not exactly the most popular outlet for Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire. As a strategy to pull off an upset victory for the Democratic presidential nomination, it seems flawed. But, simply as a strategy to upset the media gatekeepers who Kennedy thinks have been shunning him for nearly two decades, it makes perfect sense.

JACKSON, Mississippi — Mississippi isn’t that Republican.

Although Republicans have a monopoly on statewide office and supermajorities in the state legislature, Mississippi is a lighter shade of red than outsiders might think. It has been consistently easy in recent years for Democrats to get up to 45 percent of the vote here, but nearly impossible for them to top 50.

“In Mississippi, if you’re winning by double digits, that’s a real blowout,” said Austin Barbour, a longtime GOP strategist in the state. 

Of course, close doesn’t count for much in electoral politics. But that history of close top-of-the-ticket races in the Magnolia State — combined with a compelling Democratic candidate and a not terribly popular Republican incumbent — means that this year’s gubernatorial election has become one of Democrats’ top targets in an odd year.

In 2023, their hope is that Brandon Presley, a longtime elected public service commissioner from the northeast corner of the state with a fondness for Diet Mountain Dew and folksy aphorisms, can somehow break their streak and win the state’s odd-year gubernatorial election. To do so, Presley would have to beat incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves, who has a formidable war chest and a well-oiled political machine, but who is also tarnished by scandal and has one of the lowest approval ratings of any governor in the country.

Presley will also have to motivate the state’s Black voters to turn out, persuade the state’s remaining swing voters to support him, and do absolutely nothing to motivate the Trump base, who voted in record numbers in 2020. If everything goes right as he navigates those dynamics and the state’s convoluted political geography, he’d become the first Democrat to win the governor’s mansion since 1999.

Mississippi politics, explained

Mississippi is both the Blackest and perhaps the most racially polarized state in the United States. Roughly 37 percent of the population is Black, and those Mississippians almost invariably vote for Democrats. In 2020, when Donald Trump won the Magnolia State by a 16-point margin, exit polls showed that 81 percent of white voters supported him, but only 5 percent of Black voters. This divide is shown clearly on the map of the state: Where Black voters cluster, Democrats win. And while racial politics is the primary factor in a state still associated with the civil rights movement’s struggle against Jim Crow, its patchwork political geography also plays an important role in shaping the political landscape.

The white voters in the state that Presley needs to win include both ancestral Democrats who have swung toward the GOP in the Trump era and well-educated establishment Republicans who are appalled by Trump. Even if Mississippi Democrats can successfully woo a significant number of those voters and turn out a significant number of Black voters, a too-lopsided defeat in Republican-leaning areas can still doom them. Mississippi Democrats have to be lucky in all areas of the state; Mississippi Republicans only have to be lucky in one.

“I think enough of your white voters are going to have to say, ‘I think Brandon can do a better job,’” said Ronnie Musgrove, the state’s last Democratic governor. “There’s nothing about him that really scares them. African American voters have got to believe that he can do a better job for all communities.”

Mississippi’s complicated political map, explained

Mississippi’s convoluted political geography exacerbates the challenge Presley faces. He has to overwhelmingly win both rural and urban Black voters while winning enough white voters, not just in prosperous suburbs and booming college towns, but in remote rural enclaves as well.

The state’s Democratic strongholds, which are also the most heavily Black parts of the state, are the Mississippi Delta and the state capital of Jackson. The former is a rural stretch of land nestled between the banks of the Mississippi River and the Yazoo River that includes some of the most heavily African American jurisdictions in the country. It consists of some of the richest farmland in the United States and is populated by people with some of the lowest incomes. Its population is also rapidly shrinking as residents move out for economic opportunity. 

Jackson has been troubled in recent years, dealing with a major water crisis that left residents without clean water and a spike in violent crime that has left the city with the highest homicide rate in the country. Although Jackson has prosperous sections with shiny new beer gardens and a Whole Foods, it also has deeply impoverished neighborhoods in the south of the city where ramshackle houses stand on streets without sidewalks and public parks are littered with fallen tree limbs. 

The rest of the state is divided up in ways that don’t lend themselves to easy characterization. Perhaps the backbone of the Mississippi GOP is the Gulf Coast, which was one of the first parts of the state to go Republican at a federal level. Gerald Blessey, the former Democratic mayor of Biloxi, described it as “culturally aligned with the stretch of the country from Pensacola, Florida, to Lafayette, Louisiana” more than the rest of the South. It’s far more Catholic than the rest of the state and economically distinct, relying instead on the trinity of tourism, seafood, and military installations as the basis of its economy.

Another core Republican region is the Pine Belt, which separates the coast from the rest of the state. It’s rural, it’s majority white, and it has long rejected the Democratic Party — Forrest County, which includes Hattiesburg, has not voted for the Democratic presidential nominee since 1944. 

In contrast, Northeast Mississippi was once a Democratic stronghold but has followed much of the rest of the state in veering Republican. Nestled in Appalachia and one of the whitest regions of the state, it resembles West Virginia politically as much as it does the Gulf Coast. 

Then there are the suburbs: Madison and Rankin counties, which surround Jackson, and DeSoto County, just south of Memphis. While Rankin has remained solidly Republican, both Madison and DeSoto have moved toward Democrats in recent years for varying reasons. Madison County, outside Jackson, is the best-educated jurisdiction in the state, and Joe Biden’s performance there in 2020 was the best by a Democratic presidential nominee since Walter Mondale (he still lost by 12 percent). DeSoto County, in suburban Memphis, has seen a surge in population growth as middle-class African Americans have moved south from Memphis. It is an area that has long been detached from the rest of the state as residents watch Memphis television and consume Tennessee-focused media.

Those factors have added up to recent elections like these: In 2018, Mike Espy, the Democratic candidate in a special election for the US Senate, lost by 7 percent and, in 2020, lost a rematch against incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 10 percent. In 2019, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jim Hood lost by only 5 percent. While Democrats view these as moral victories and a sign of hope, Republicans scoff. After all, Democrats lost all of these marquee, top-of-the-ticket races while the GOP picked up wins in local races and built up a supermajority in the state legislature.

A charismatic challenger versus an entrenched incumbent

Despite all that, Democrats are confident this year will be different. They tout Presley as a gifted retail politician, and they aren’t wrong. He is always ready to share an anecdote and his cellphone number with voters.

On a steamy Saturday morning at a farmers market in Hernando, Mississippi, Presley worked the vendors and seemingly had a connection to almost every other person minding a stall. With one man unloading fresh meat out of a truck, he identified the rural country crossroads where the man lived in northeast Mississippi before chatting about local politics and swapping stories with him.

Musgrove described him as one of the best stump speakers he’s seen, though he mournfully added that “we’re in an age where stump speaking doesn’t matter” with the dominance of 30-second television ads in political campaigns. 

There’s also the compelling family story. For a national audience, Presley’s famous relative is his second cousin Elvis. For a northeast Mississippi audience, it’s his uncle Harold, a county sheriff killed in the line of duty. And he has a strong record of electoral success, consistently winning elections in northern Mississippi long after political realignment has turned that region red, while also maintaining strong relationships with Black leaders across the state. He touted his record, “holding town hall meetings, listening, delivering on issues,” as the key to his political success in the state.

But Democrats’ optimism this year also stems from their view of Reeves as uniquely vulnerable. Reeves eked out a victory in his initial election against the longtime state attorney general Hood in 2019, but the race was close enough that it required Donald Trump to show up for a rally in Tupelo, the largest city in northeast Mississippi, on Reeves’s behalf. 

Since taking office, Reeves has dealt with the consequences of an ongoing scandal involving the misuse of welfare funds. The money, intended to aid low-income families, was diverted in the late 2010s to fund things like a volleyball court at the University of Southern Mississippi after famous alum Brett Favre lobbied then-governor Phil Bryant for it, as well as for a fitness program run by Reeves’s personal trainer. Although Reeves’s ties to scandal are mostly tangential — the money was spent during the administration of his predecessor Phil Bryant while Reeves was lieutenant governor — there have been questions about how much Reeves knew at the time. It has been enough for Democrats to paint the incumbent as corrupt. It doesn’t help that Democrats had already long painted Reeves as a clumsy, out-of-touch politician. Without prompting, he was derided as “tater tot” by multiple farmers market vendors. In an interview with Vox, Presley referred to him as being “born with a silver spoon in his mouth” four times in half an hour. 

The central plank of Presley’s campaign is to expand Medicaid in the state. Mississippi is one of 10 states that has not expanded the health care program for workers with low incomes, and Presley has pledged to do so immediately if elected. Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster advising the campaign, noted that the issue “was incredibly important.” In his view, “Medicaid is not a political issue, but it’s very much a nuts-and-bolts pocketbook issue”; McCrary also noted that in the neighboring states of Arkansas and Louisiana, where Medicaid has been expanded, Republicans haven’t taken consequential steps to undo that expansion.

Presley is also pushing to cut the state’s grocery tax — Mississippi is one of a handful of states that impose sales taxes on groceries — and pledged to pass an ethics reform bill if elected. Presley insisted that if he wins it will be “a mandate” from voters to clean up Jackson and that he would call a special session of the state legislature just to focus on that legislation.

While no one would accuse Reeves of being the most likely to charm a farmers market, he is undeniably a canny operator. He’s a dogged fundraiser who is deeply respected in Republican circles for his political acumen, and he’s spent most of his adult life in statewide office: He was elected state treasurer as a political novice at the age of 29, serving two terms, followed by two more as the state’s lieutenant governor before his successful 2019 run for governor.

Yet his ascension to the governor’s mansion wasn’t smooth. Reeves was taken to a runoff in his primary by Bill Waller, a former state Supreme Court chief justice who filed at the last minute and ran as a comparative moderate. In the general election, Reeves faced a close battle with Hood, who won over sufficient support from white voters but failed to adequately juice turnout among Black voters. The last Democratic gubernatorial candidate to do better than Hood was Musgrove when he won in 1999.

Espy told Vox that “the difference between winning by a little and losing by a little really depends on the strength of the Black vote.” He noted that, before entering the race, Presley was “not really known in the Black community.” 

Democrats, though, see an opening, simply because of the disdain Black voters have for the incumbent. “There is massive enthusiasm in communities of color because of how bad Tate Reeves is and that is helping Presley create inroads in communities that potentially weren’t there in 2019,” argued one plugged-in Mississippi Democrat.

Presley spoke of Reeves with an undisguised personal contempt. It wasn’t just that he sees the incumbent as the corrupt product of a “country club set.” He also thinks Reeves is just fundamentally out of touch with most Mississippians. “I’m much more relatable to a person at the country store in Ingomar, Mississippi, than Tate Reeves,” Presley insisted. “He’s uncomfortable around common people. He is uncomfortable outside the confines of a country club, or the governor’s mansion, or some fundraiser, and I’m not.”

In contrast, Presley dodged when asked if he would have run against Waller, Reeves’s more moderate opponent in the 2019 primary, if he was the incumbent instead. “I don’t think Bill Waller would have been the type of governor that Tate Reeves has been,” he said. “He’s been concerned with nothing but making his buddies rich and handing out jobs like candy at Christmas time to his friends.”

Reeves is painting Presley as the candidate of “the national liberal machine” while touting his own record, which includes significant improvements in state schools, according to standardized testing — the state’s reading scores have increased along with its high school graduation rates — as well as tax cuts and a concerted effort to keep businesses open during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In a socially conservative state, Presley has had to run a campaign that is different from national Democrats. He described himself as “pro-life, all my entire political career.” When asked by Vox if life begins at conception, he said, “I believe so.” He has indicated his broad comfort with the Mississippi law limiting abortion that sparked the 2022 Supreme Court case that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and has consistently emphasized his support for exceptions to allow abortions in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is threatened.

On another hot-button cultural issue — a law just signed by Reeves that would ban gender reassignment surgeries for minors and make it illegal for doctors to prescribe hormones and puberty blockers to them — Presley made clear he was staying out of it. “I’m not going to be leading or a part of any effort to overturn the law as it currently exists in Mississippi,” he said. 

That won’t stop Republicans from trying to tie him to the national party. Frank Bordeaux, the state GOP chair, told Vox, “Our opponent has made himself into the national Democrat … That’s obviously a great thing for us.”

Presley, though, needs national money to stay viable. According to the most recent campaign finance report, Reeves’s campaign has more than five times as much money on hand as Presley’s ($9.6 million on hand versus $1.85 million). National Democrats have been willing to overlook Presley’s heresies from liberal doctrine so far. After all, Presley is running in Mississippi, not Massachusetts.

What Mississippi’s chaotic GOP means for 2023

While the Mississippi Republican Party represents a formidable political opponent to Presley, it’s riven with internal feuds and divides. 

When the state was a one-party Democratic state for most of the 20th century, Mississippi Democrats were notorious for their factionalism. Their divide was between more populist figures within the party and more conservative ones. That divide has migrated over to state Republicans as they have taken over the state. Often these differences have been more focused on tone and style than policy, but with the rise of the Tea Party and then Trump, they have turned into an active conflict within the GOP. 

The conflict is personified by the rise of Chris McDaniel, a controversial state senator from Jones County in the Pine Belt who is currently mounting a primary challenge to the sitting lieutenant governor, Delbert Hosemann. The race is particularly important because Mississippi is a state with perhaps the strongest lieutenant governorship in the country. 

Hosemann is a traditional establishment Republican. McDaniel is anything but. A right-wing firebrand, McDaniel gained national attention when he launched a 2014 primary campaign against longtime Sen. Thad Cochran that forced the six-term incumbent into a runoff, and he was one of the few politicians to stump for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was accused of making inappropriate sexual advances to teenagers, in 2017. McDaniel lost the 2014 race to Cochran after an organized effort to get Black Democratic voters to cast their ballots for Cochran in the runoff, thanks to Mississippi’s open primaries. McDaniel may face the same challenges this year: While he has a devoted base of support, he’s loathed by Democrats and by many within his own party. The result is that many Democrats, including Musgrove, are likely to take a Republican ballot in the primary. Reeves has long feuded with Hosemann and has implied that he’ll support McDaniel, who he has suggested is the only conservative in the race.

The populist-versus-establishment divide isn’t just about policy, though. It’s often a matter of style. Presley proudly describes himself as a populist. “I am an unabashed populist,” he said. “I have been from the day I entered political office — if the definition of populist is that you side with the people against a system that is set up against the people all day long.” But it’s still a stretch to think that stylistic similarity with an ascendant wing of the GOP will trump his party affiliation with many voters.

Presley has to hope that his ability to blend in at a country store in rural Mississippi overrides the state’s current political inclinations. Reeves’s massive fundraising advantage will enable him to blast his message painting Presley as a national Democrat across all corners of the state. And to finally close the gap that’s kept them shut out of power for decades, Democrats have to hope enough Mississippians will look beyond national politics.