How a Democrat in Suburban Minneapolis Made His District Blue

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — It’s a little after 2 p.m., and beads of sweat are forming on the brow of Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota. He’s wielding a two-foot crowbar to yank up rotten floorboards in the kitchen of a century-old home along Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis, and working fast.

“How can you not love this?” Phillips, now upstairs, exclaims as he prepares to saw a hole in the wall of the house’s newly redesigned master bedroom. Despite his staff’s efforts to warn him, he steps on a nail. It’s a short one, thankfully, that doesn’t pierce the sole of his sneaker, and he gets right back to it.

Welcome to “On the Job With Dean” — unconventional politicking for an unconventional politician, a suburban Democratic lawmaker whose fortunes say a lot about American politics in 2022. On this particular autumn day, Phillips is moonlighting with a demolition crew for a local contractor, part of a series of odd jobs he takes on, he told me, to feel grounded.

In an age when political outsiders are often held up as breaths of fresh air and career politicians are widely reviled, Phillips, a 53-year-old liquor and ice cream entrepreneur whose grandmother was “Dear Abby” and whose mother was a clothier for Prince, labors hard not to look like a traditional pol. Campaign rallies are not his thing. On any given day, you might find him mixing drinks at an ax-throwing bar inside the Mall of America, dipping “witches’ fingers” at a candy factory or driving a 20-ton snowplow through a serpentine training course.

In 2018, he flipped this district, a mostly upper-middle-class area of single-family homes and shopping malls that hugs the western border of Minneapolis, to Democratic control for the first time since 1960. His Republican opponent, Erik Paulsen, had won the district by 14 percentage points just two years earlier.

Phillips ran a nostalgia-infused campaign calling for civility and “conversation,” while ruthlessly defining Paulsen as a no-show with a memorable, documentary-style ad featuring a man dressed in a Bigfoot suit.

“I thought I was good at hiding,” Bigfoot muses. “Then Erik Paulsen comes along.”

Phillips won by 12 points in 2018, then again by the same margin in 2020. Since then, Republicans have essentially given up on the seat — a silent tribute due in part to his astute political instincts, in part to widespread aversion to Donald Trump in Minnesota and in part to the deeper demographic shifts that presaged Phillips’s 2018 win.

“It was a Mitt Romney district,” said Abou Amara, a Democratic strategist in Minneapolis. “Most of those Republicans aren’t coming back.”

A tale of two suburbs

Republican operatives are focusing instead on winning back what is proving to be more fertile territory this year: the nearby Second Congressional District, held by Representative Angie Craig.

Also a former business executive, Craig holds positions that are almost identical to Phillips’s. But she is much more conventional in style, which might help explain her plight.

While Phillips seems almost driven to prove that “No Labels”-style centrism does not have to be boring and poll-tested, Craig appears determined to hunker down and play by the old rules. That caution has made her more vulnerable to the gale-force national winds bearing down on generic Democrats in swing districts across the country.

But the deeper differences between their two districts are more important, which says a lot about how America’s two major political parties see their shifting fortunes in suburbia in these midterms — often, but wrongly, described as an undifferentiated campaign battleground.

On the surface, the two districts look similar, with income levels that are roughly the same. But Craig’s, which stretches to the Wisconsin border, is larger and less dense. It includes more blue-collar and rural voters, and has long been the more culturally conservative of the two.

The biggest gap may be in education levels: Nearly 52 percent of residents in Phillips’s district have at least a college degree, while only 42 percent of those in Craig’s do, a figure more comparable to other swing districts nationally. Phillips’s district is slightly more diverse, too: Nearly 13 percent of residents there were born abroad, versus just over 9 percent in Craig’s district.

Those subtle distinctions are enough to give Republicans an opening. So while both seats have swung toward Democrats in the Trump era, Craig’s race has become one of the most hotly contested and most expensive campaigns in the country, with more than $10 million pouring in from outside Republican groups. By contrast, Phillips and his opponent have spent about $200,000 combined — essentially nothing.

This year, in a freakish reprise of what happened in 2020, one of Craig’s opponents, the candidate of the Legal Marijuana Now party, died in early October. So not only must she contend with a Republican adversary, Tyler Kistner, who is well-funded and has decent name recognition after coming up just 2.2 percentage points short of Craig in 2020, but the deceased marijuana candidate also remains on the ballot and threatens to siphon votes from her left.

Can Democrats rebrand?

An heir to a local liquor company who co-founded the gelato business Talenti, then sold it to Unilever in 2014 for a tidy profit, Phillips approaches politics like a branding exercise. And in his mind, Democrats have a branding problem.

From Talenti, he learned to appreciate the power of nostalgia for a simpler time in America, he told me — but not, he stressed, of the exclusionary Make America Great Again variety.

In 2018, he began traveling around the district in a vintage 1960s delivery van called the “Government Repair Truck,” offering “coffee and conversation” to would-be constituents. It became a campaign signature, and “everyone’s invited” became his tagline and unofficial motto. (There was also, briefly, the barely seaworthy “Government Repair Pontoon Boat.” And soon, the “Government Repair Ice Shed” will be hauled onto the frozen surface of Lake Minnetonka for ice fishing.)

When Phillips was growing up, his stepfather made him work in the warehouse of their alcohol business, and he learned the art of retail politics, he said, while going on sales calls to liquor stores.

“My dad always said that selling starts with listening,” Phillips told me as we ate French fries and Juicy Lucy cheeseburgers, a Minneapolis delicacy that, judging from his slim frame, he rarely eats. On sales calls, he made sure to ask what varieties of liquor were hot and adjust his pitch accordingly.

“On the Job With Dean” is just one of several branded “series,” as his team calls them, in Phillips’s political arsenal.

There’s also “Surprise and Delight,” where Phillips drops off doughnuts and hoovers up scraps of intel from police and fire units, such as the latest local trends in recruitment of new officers and firefighters, car theft and ambulance calls; “Civics 101,” in which he delivers a guest lecture on democracy at high schools; and “Common Ground,” a two-hour event moderated by a licensed marriage counselor and featuring four liberals and four conservatives who are paired together, then told to come up with solutions to thorny public policy problems.

Phillips seems to recognize, however, that merely changing the packaging of run-of-the-mill Democratic positions is not enough. He co-sponsored a bill this year to fund the police, and his House office in Washington made sure I knew about it. This summer, he became the first Democrat in Congress to call for President Biden not to run in 2024, a position he took, he told me, because it’s “what I believe.”

Some in the Minnesota Democratic Party are urging Phillips to run for Senate, in the much-rumored event that one of the state’s two incumbent Democrats retires soon. As many as 10 candidates are likely to run, local Democrats said, given how rarely those seats open up.

At our lunch, Phillips confessed his worry that running for Senate would pull him away from the kind of local engagement “I find joy in most.” It would also force him to raise millions of dollars, a task he abhors, and to travel constantly. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a close Phillips ally, once promised to visit all of Minnesota’s 87 counties every year, an exhausting vow that has become the new statewide campaign standard. But Phillips didn’t rule it out entirely.

For the moment, he is running for a House leadership position — co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, a sleepy group whose influence is hard to identify, positive or otherwise. He is campaigning for the job in typical Phillips fashion, most recently by handing out custom-branded packets of wildflower seeds on the House floor that say “Let’s Grow!” on the packaging.

Earlier, as we pulled up to the snowplow course, Phillips showed me a years-old photograph of him sitting at the desk of Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, for whom he interned in 1989. It took him years to screw up the courage to tell Leahy, who is now retiring, that he had sneaked into the senator’s office while he was out of town.

“That’s the first time I sat in a place of power,” he recalled. “And I liked the feeling.”

What to read

• Democratic candidates are struggling to find a closing message on the economy that both acknowledges voters’ troubles while making the case that the party in power, not Republicans, holds the solutions, Jonathan Weisman and Neil Vigdor report.

• “Most political races are about authenticity on some level: who tries too hard, who doesn’t try hard enough, who can read the electorate without staring,” Matt Flegenheimer writes. Tim Ryan, he says, “has made Ohio perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground by taking this premise to its logical extreme.”

• John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, faces twin challenges in his debate on Tuesday night against Mehmet Oz: making the case for his policies while convincing voters he is healthy enough to serve, write Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Trip Gabriel.

• For the first time in 70 years, America’s largest majority Black city may not send a Black representative to Washington. Clyde McGrady reports from Detroit.

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