Cara Brown McCormick
With the release of Original Sin, a detailed insider account by CNN’s Jake Tapper and journalist Alex Thompson, one voice stands out not just for what he saw, but for what he did.
That voice is former Minnesota US Rep. Dean Phillips, the only elected Democrat in the United States who dared to challenge President Biden’s reelection from within the party. Phillips’ newly published essay in The Free Press is more than a reflection. It is a detailed, personal indictment of the machinery that protects incumbents, stifles dissent, and treats voter choice as a threat to be managed.
“It’s astonishing that, for so long, Americans have both enabled and tolerated a virtual monopoly on our democracy by two private corporations: the Democratic and Republican parties,” Phillips writes. “In the United States, we should never tolerate monopolies, or in this case, duopolies, in any category, never mind the most important one—our democracy.”
Phillips recounts seeing President Biden in private meetings, on flights aboard Air Force One, and during-party events. Like many of his colleagues, he feared that Biden would lose to Donald Trump if he were renominated. However, unlike most others, he took action, starting in mid-2023. He placed calls to top Democratic leaders urging them to challenge Biden for the nomination. To a person, they declined.
“Cometh the moment—cameth nobody,” he writes.
So Phillips ran himself, entering the Democratic primary for president in October 2023 in what he describes as a last-ditch attempt to spark debate and accountability. Instead, he was met with scorn, silence, procedural barriers, and coordinated efforts to erase his challenge.
State parties blocked him from ballots. The DNC canceled debates. Media networks with ties to the White House downplayed or ignored his candidacy.
“This wasn’t a fight for democracy,” Phillips writes, “but a coordinated fight against democracy—executed by a private corporation with no accountability to voters.”
His essay resonates even more forcefully against the backdrop of Original Sin, which concludes that Democratic insiders knew Biden was struggling, but collectively chose not to inform the public. Phillips now positions that decision as a symptom of a deeper predicament: a political system designed to preserve itself rather than serve its voters.
“Constant lying and gaslighting the public about Biden’s health has cost the Democratic Party the public’s trust,” he writes.
But Phillips doesn’t stop at diagnosis. His essay is a call to break the dysfunction through structural reform, competition, and a rejection of manufactured inevitability.
“In real terms, reform means breaking down barriers to access ballots and the electoral system; fostering and inspiring competent, common-sense candidates; and encouraging the rise of at least one compelling third party that offers competitive candidates.”
During his presidential campaign, Phillips promised a “bipartisan cabinet” and “common ground dinners in the White House,” where “red and blue Americans from all across the country” would have a “nice, casual conversation with their president” and “wear jeans.” “We’ve handed the keys to the far right and the far left,” he said at one point during the campaign.
Today, Phillips is specific about what issues he thinks voters will unify behind in the future:
“There must be an almost obsessive focus on real-world outcomes: lowering healthcare costs, expanding housing, improving public safety and public education, and managing cities, states, and our country in a fiscally responsible manner.”
And he speaks directly to Americans across ideological lines:
“American voters of all political perspectives are tired of being ignored, talked down to, lied to, canceled, and expected to choose between competing versions of increasingly similar political dysfunction.”
Though he left Congress in 2025, Phillips’ career — and his 2024 campaign — were built on challenging the odds. First elected in 2018, he flipped a longtime Republican seat in Minnesota and built a reputation for bipartisanship, civility, and practical problem-solving. He served on the House Ethics and Foreign Affairs Committees and as vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus.
Before entering public service, Phillips led his family’s liquor business and helped expand Talenti gelato into a national brand. His grandfather, Eddie Phillips, was a prominent business leader who was also involved in politics.
Phillips’ campaign once again exposed the obstacles reformers face when confronting entrenched power, especially when that power is shared by two private parties that have come to function as gatekeepers of the American political system.
Robert F. Kennedy, for example, chose to challenge the system by dropping his Democratic Party registration and running as an independent. But, as IVN exposed in our first How it Really Works series: Running for President as an Independent; the obstacles thrown in front of candidates outside of the two-party system are insurmountable.
Eventually, hundreds of insiders and journalists were willing to speak candidly to Tapper and Thompson for their book Original Sin. However, during the campaign itself, when brutal truths might have altered the outcome, most remained silent.
Dean Phillips did not. He raised concerns when they were unpopular, challenged the direction of his party, and took a political risk few were willing to take.
That kind of decision recalls a well-known passage from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, now widely known as “The Man in the Arena” speech. The passage is a tribute to those who step forward despite the cost:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."