Dean Phillips is getting a little fed up with his party. The third-term Democratic congressman is on a “crusade,” he says. “I’m saying we need presidential diversity on the stage.” It is a toasty afternoon in mid-August at the WCCO-TV television studios in Minneapolis; Phillips has had a lot more media hits in recent weeks ever since he said Democrats need to challenge President Joe Biden in the presidential primary. In his words, he’s “just giving voice to private conversations” (he wouldn’t say with whom). The Democratic Party—and the country—shouldn’t just gamble on an octogenarian with a roughly 42% approval rating to beat Donald Trump, Phillips tells me.

“I came from the business world, and anybody in business knows you don’t just produce a product and then hope there’s a market for it,” he says. “What we tend to do as Democrats is kind of identify the product, and then try to convince people to buy it. I’m not trying to compare people to products, but that’s the analogy. And that’s what happened in 2016.” 

To be clear, Phillips does not support a third-party run against Biden like that of Cornel West, who is running under the Green Party banner, or—potentially—Senator Joe Manchin, who has continued to flirt with running as an independent. “Those people are absolutely helping Trump,” Phillips says. He’s not a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy-peddling, anti-vaccine, Republican-megadonor-backed candidate in the Democratic primary, but says Kennedy’s “not someone to be dismissed.” He’s also backed away from the idea of running himself. Phillips acknowledges that he had chatted with donors about a possible run, as Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported, but tells me that he did not go to New York City to meet with anyone; he spoke with them over Zoom, and “If they’re asking me, they’re asking everybody—and I know that they are, by the way.” 

Rather, he says this is all about the need for a conversation about the future of the Democratic roster. “There is an extraordinary bench. Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock on a ticket in 2024 would be a dream team,” Phillips says. “You’d have a female at the top of the ticket, in a year in which reproductive rights are going to be front and center…an issue that, sadly, is probably the one issue that the president’s really uncomfortable talking about.”

Except Whitmer has made it clear that she’s not running for president against Biden; she’s a cochair on his 2024 campaign. Warnock is on the Biden–Kamala Harris campaign advisory board. Phillips’s intentions aside, the effect, for now, is a confirmation of Biden’s weaknesses without a clear alternative. That’s a reality Democratic voters appear increasingly comfortable with; once-skeptical Democratic primary voters are getting back in line behind the president, per recent polling. Still, the election, especially if against Trump, looks like it will be very tight.

Seated in the television station’s greenroom, the Minnesota congressman recalled finding his then 16-year-old daughter crying in her room and his then 18-year-old daughter, who had cast her first vote in an election, distraught the morning after Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. That was when he decided to run for Congress, ultimately flipping Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District from Republican to Democratic control, in 2018, for the first time in almost 60 years. He defeated incumbent Erik Paulsen by more than 11 percentage points. In Congress, he’s joined the moderates in the Problem Solvers Caucus and New Democrats Coalition. Biden’s politics are not far from his own, Phillips admits. “I love Joe Biden. I think he’s an extraordinary man. I think he saved the country. His policies, I voted for every single one of them, and I’ve helped market them. [I am] not someone who’s objecting to the past. I’m simply making an argument for the future. And I believe that we should, if he’s intent on being one of the products, I just think we should also offer some others.” 

Phillips’s primary concern is Biden’s age. “Age is the main issue in this election, because we have two men who are older than Bill Clinton, who was president when I was in college.”

Phillips insists he is just saying publicly what many Democrats are saying privately. But he certainly isn’t getting brownie points for these 15 minutes in the spotlight either. “Stand down,” is the resounding reaction he has received. Indeed, just hours after our interview, Phillips was scheduled to speak with House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries about this self-titled “crusade.” Phillips predicted Jeffries would tell him to get in line. “It’ll be, probably, an interesting one. And I don’t know the outcome.” He adds, “Many of us learn the hard way that if you simply pursue principle, you don’t have long careers in Congress. If there’s anything I want people to know, it’s that there’s no political reward right now for speaking one’s truth, for pursuing principle, because if the team doesn’t like it, they’re gonna trade you.” 

Phillips wouldn’t tell me how his call with Jeffries went other than calling the minority leader “one of the finest and most principled people with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working.” (Jeffries’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Phillips’s Democratic Minnesota colleagues are largely toeing the party line. In a previous interview with VF, Senator Tina Smith threw her lot in with Biden. “I’m focused on reelecting President Biden and reelecting a Democratic Senate and maybe even adding seats,” Smith said earlier this summer. “I think President Biden is going to be in a very strong position,” she added. Though not everyone is objecting to what Phillips is selling. Progressive political group TakeAction Minnesota seemed more open to the idea: “There are a lot of elements of what Representative Phillips is saying that make sense of how we believe small d democracy should work,” Elianne Farhat, executive director of the progressive political group TakeAction Minnesota, says in an interview with VF. “It’s good for there to be many opinions and voices in our politics.”

If Phillips’s call to action has inspired any Democrats to jump on board in what will inevitably be an uphill battle against the sitting president, time is running out. As Phillips himself conceded in a recent interview with Minnesota’s Star Tribune, it takes “tremendous amount of effort and time” to stand up a competitive presidential campaign—and state filing deadlines are approaching. In other words, this “crusade” may have started too late to begin with.

Still, Phillips, draped in a leopard-print salon cape as a makeup artist touches him up before his on-camera media hit, stands by his message. “He promised to be a transitional president,” he tells me. “I think it’s time for the new generation to rise…. Almost everybody in these circles in Washington kind of agreed, and then suddenly something shifted. ‘Circle the horses, put on the blinders, get in line.’”