Dean Phillips

Dean Benson Phillips (né Pfefer; born January 20, 1969) is an American politician, businessman, and former presidential candidate who served from 2019 to 2025 as the U.S. representative for Minnesota's 3rd congressional district. A member of the Democratic Party, Phillips was an executive in the food and beverage industry before entering politics. Formerly the president and CEO of his family's distilled spirits business, Phillips Distilling Company, he also was the co-owner of Talenti Gelato, Belvedere Vodka, and the Twin Cities-based coffeehouse chain Penny's.

Phillips was first elected in 2018, defeating six-term Republican incumbent Erik Paulsen. He became the first Democrat to win the seat in sixty years, and was reelected twice by comfortable margins. In November 2023, Phillips announced that he would not run for another term. Phillips was considered a moderate Democrat and briefly co-chaired the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

Despite consistently voting in support of President Joe Biden's policy positions, Phillips challenged him for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2024 presidential election. Running a long-shot campaign centered around providing younger leadership, he received four delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the second-most of any candidate in the primaries, making him the runner-up to Biden.

Phillips was born to DeeDee (Cohen) and Artie Pfefer in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1969. His father was killed in the Vietnam War six months after Phillips was born, making him a Gold Star Son. His mother married Eddie Phillips, heir to the Phillips Distilling Company and the son of advice columnist Pauline Phillips (popularly known as Dear Abby), in 1972. Eddie adopted Dean, who took the last name Phillips. He was raised Jewish.

In the early 1970s, Phillips moved from Saint Paul to Edina. He attended The Blake School. In the summer of 1989, Phillips interned for Senator Patrick Leahy on Capitol Hill, an experience that helped inspire his own public service 30 years later. Phillips attended Brown University, where he served as consul (president) of the Sigma Chi fraternity, Beta Nu chapter. He graduated in 1991. Phillips worked for bicycle equipment startup InMotion for two years before joining his family's business Phillips Distilling Company, where he served in multiple positions in rectifying, production, sales, and marketing management. He completed his Master of Business Administration at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management in 2000, after which he was named president and CEO of the company.

After selling Belvedere Vodka to luxury conglomerate LVMH for an undisclosed sum in the mid 2000s, Phillips pioneered the organic vodka category with Prairie Organic Vodka and flavored whiskey category with Phillips Union Whisky. In 2012, he stepped aside to run one of his other corporate investments, Talenti gelato, where he served as chairman until it was sold for an undisclosed amount to Unilever in 2014. Phillips served on the board at Allina Health, one of Minnesota's largest nonprofit health care systems, from 2005 to 2011, and as chairman from 2009 to 2011. From 2013 to 2015, he co-chaired the We Day organization events that encourage student volunteerism. Phillips also chaired the board of the Phillips Family Foundation, his family's charitable work foundation.

Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party chairman Ken Martin recruited Phillips to run for Congress after trying for many years. Martin and others worked hard to get Phillips elected. He saw Phillips as a "rising star" in the party. In 2018, former Minnesota Supreme Court justice and professional football player Alan Page contributed $1,000 to Phillips's campaign against Republican U.S. representative Erik Paulsen in Minnesota's Third Congressional District. In September 2018, while on her way to the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, actress Laura Dern asked people to vote for Phillips in his congressional race. Also in 2018, the gun safety organization Giffords, founded by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, endorsed Phillips in the race for Minnesota's 3rd congressional district. In a statement, Giffords praised Phillips for his commitment to cut ties between Congress and special interests, particularly the gun lobby. During that campaign, Phillips drove a 1960 International Harvester milk truck emblazoned with his name and the tagline "Government Repair Truck" to 32 cities and towns across the district. He also used a pontoon boat to campaign on Lake Minnetonka.

In 2018, Phillips ran for the United States House of Representatives in Minnesota's 3rd congressional district as a Democrat. In the Democratic primary, he defeated former sales associate Cole Young with 81.6% of the vote. Phillips won all three counties in the district. In the general election, Phillips defeated incumbent Republican Erik Paulsen with 55.6% of the vote. When he took office in 2019, he became the first Democrat to hold this seat since 1961.

Phillips ran for reelection in 2020. He defeated Cole Young in the Democratic primary with 90.7% of the vote and faced off against the Republican nominee, businessman Kendall Qualls. Phillips defeated Qualls with 55.6% of the vote.

Phillips was unopposed in the Democratic primary. In the general election, he defeated the Republican nominee, retired U.S. Navy submarine officer Tom Weiler, with 60% of the vote.

According to FiveThirtyEight's congressional vote tracker at ABC News, Phillips voted with President Joe Biden's stated public policy positions 100% of the time, making him more liberal than average in the 117th Congress when predictive scoring (district partisanship and voting record) is used. Phillips voted in favor of Biden's major economic agenda items, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act. During the start of his first term in 2019, the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University placed him 27th out of 435 members in terms of bipartisanship. In 2021, Phillips received the Bipartisan Policy Center's Bipartisan Legislative Action Award.

Phillips authored five provisions in the For the People Act, an anti-corruption and voting rights reform bill that passed the House in March 2021. It also included a major overhaul of campaign finance and redistricting laws. Phillips's provisions for the package included the Voter NOTICE Act, which sought to fight disinformation, and the FIREWALL Act, which sought to strengthen safeguards of online advertising.

In July 2022, Phillips became the first Democratic member of Congress to say President Biden should not run for reelection and called for "generational change", pointing to Biden's age. In July 2023, Phillips said he was considering challenging Biden in the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries. Before launching his campaign, Phillips reportedly reached out to other elected Democratic officials, such as governors Gretchen Whitmer and JB Pritzker, to urge them to enter the presidential primary, but they declined to speak with him directly. Phillips said that he found both the city of Washington, D.C., and the reluctance of his fellow Democrats to call on Biden not to run again to be distastefully insular and partisan. In October 2023, he announced that he would step down as co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee because his views on the 2024 U.S. presidential election were incongruent with the majority of his caucus. Many Democrats in Congress urged Phillips not to launch a primary bid against Biden.

On October 27, 2023, in Concord, New Hampshire, Phillips announced his candidacy for president after filing the paperwork with the Federal Election Commission the previous day. During his campaign, Phillips argued that Biden would be a weak general-election candidate due to his age and low approval ratings. He campaigned as a younger alternative who would be a stronger opponent to Donald Trump. Phillips's campaign slogan was "Make America Affordable Again", a play on Trump's political movement and "Make America Great Again", as well as high voter dissatisfaction with the economy, especially inflation and prices. Phillips's campaign advisor Steve Schmidt said that Phillips saw not being well-known "as an asset: he doesn't have decades of political stink on him to overcome, and he can build up a lot of name recognition quickly because you can get famous very fast in American politics". Schmidt added, "The idea that voters having a choice in the primary will ultimately threaten democracy by throwing the election to Trump demonstrates how far off the rails we've gotten."

In November 2023, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College and the Dartmouth Political Union co-hosted a discussion with Phillips as part of their "Path to the Presidency" speaker series to discuss his campaign and policy positions. In New Hampshire, Phillips hit the campaign trail with a “Dean Phillips for President” bus, and his 1960 International Harvester milk truck, dubbed the "government repair truck", made an appearance repainted with "Dean Phillips for President". On November 3, 2023, Phillips appeared on an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. Host Bill Maher lauded Phillips but stopped short of a full endorsement. On November 17, Phillips joined the All-In podcast for an interview. On November 18, he discussed the case for his campaign at the Blue Jamboree rally hosted by the Charleston County Democratic Party in South Carolina. On November 30, Phillips visited the Pod Save America studio to discuss his campaign. On December 8, he met with voters at a veterans' home in Tilton, New Hampshire, and at a town hall in Exeter, New Hampshire.

On December 14, during an appearance on Meet the Press NOW, Phillips criticized Biden's candidacy, saying, "The president is not a threat to democracy, but running and suppressing other candidates is a threat when you are behind in the polls like he is." He added, "He's a good man and someone I respect, but this delusion that he can win is a threat to democracy." On December 23, Phillips said that Biden should "thoughtfully exit" the race. On January 20, 2024, he told Axios that he thought it was "impossible" for Biden to do the job for four more years, and that "At that stage of life, it is impossible ultimately to conduct, to prosecute the office of the American presidency in the way that this country in the world needs right now. That is an absolute truth."

Phillips said he would try to gain access to the primary ballots in several states where the Democratic Party had excluded him. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin left Phillips off the ballot; he appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on January 26, 2024. On February 2, the court unanimously ruled that Phillips should be included on the ballot. Phillips said his campaign depended on alternative media platforms to get his message across because MSNBC and CNN would not interview him, despite giving every Republican primary challenger to Trump a town hall. Phillips accused Biden campaign representatives of pressuring liberal media outlets into blackballing and deplatforming him. The New York Times reported that during his campaign, Phillips found himself deplatformed, taken off the ballot in some states, and rarely invited on television to make his case. He also accused the Democratic National Committee of obstructing Democrats and Independents from ballot access—"bleeding campaigns dry" by suing non-incumbent candidates and imposing "absurd signature requirements".

Phillips is divorced and has two adult daughters. He is Jewish, and was acknowledged by the Minnesota publication The American Jewish World for serving on the board of Temple Israel in Minneapolis. Phillips's paternal grandmother, Pauline Phillips, was the author of the advice column "Dear Abby", under the pen name Abigail Van Buren. He has said that Elie Wiesel's book Night has stuck with him and that he kept it on his table in Washington and at home.

Phillips is friends with actor Woody Harrelson, whom he met and befriended when Harrelson rented his house while shooting the movie Wilson. Harrelson joined Phillips on a trip to Vietnam, where Phillips's father was killed in a helicopter crash. The trip to Vietnam gained more attention during a stop in Seoul, South Korea, when Phillips ran into a group of K-Pop stars from BigBang and BLACKPINK and a popular South Korean actor, Park Bo-gum, at a recording studio. Phillips called the South Korean superstars "kind and warm".

"Third Congressional District/Dean Phillips: I'll continue defending abortion rights, families' needs", Minnesota Star Tribune, October 19, 2022

"Democrats in Congress Should Hold a Confidence Vote on Biden", The Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2024

"I Warned My Party About Biden's Health. Will They Listen Now?", The Free Press, May 22, 2025

"Dean Phillips: How to Regain Trust After the Biden Coverup", The Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2025

"DEAN PHILLIPS: We can fix immigration enforcement without fueling chaos or lawlessness", Fox News, February 4, 2026