Right message, wrong time? Dean Phillips called for ‘new generation’ of leadership two years ago.

U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips was one of the first Democrats to publicly call for President Joe Biden to step aside — but he’s not gloating over the president’s decision to drop out of the race.

In stepping aside last month, Biden said verbatim what Phillips had advocated for two years: that the president needed to pass the torch to a “new generation” of leadership.

It’s a belief that the Minnesota Democrat stands by, even at the cost of alliances, falling out with fellow Democrats and what Phillips predicts has disqualified him from ever being another Democratic candidate.

“Biden did the one and only thing that I was calling for, for a year and a half, which was to just simply step aside,” he said during a wide-ranging interview at his Capitol Hill home, 10 days after Biden announced he was leaving the race they shared for nearly five months until Phillips dropped out in early March.

“The timing, and the delay in doing so and the circumstances were not advantageous. But it happened,” Phillips said. ”And I’m thrilled, I’m saddened, it’s bittersweet.”

Phillips recently finished “Into the Bright Sunshine,” a book that chronicles the life of former vice president and fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, the congressman’s self-proclaimed hero, who — like Phillips — bucked his party to call for change.

Humphrey’s moment of truth was at the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia when he gave an impassioned speech advocating for Democrats to adopt a civil rights platform. The speech could have cost him his career, but instead helped propel him to the U.S. Senate and eventually to the White House as vice president.

Phillips’ moment began during a 2022 interview on WCCO Radio, when he said he did not think Biden should run again, a response that paved the way for an eventual White House bid.

“Acts of courage, they’re not celebrated immediately. They’re painful, often, especially when you’re ahead of the curve,” he said.

“I did this because I wanted to emulate what [Humphrey] did and recognized that if it cost me my career, so be it,” Phillips said, speaking of his White House bid and the late vice president’s stand at the 1948 convention.

The congressman faults Humphrey for his unwillingness to speak out against the Vietnam War as Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president. His silence led to his eventual political downfall, a cautionary tale that Phillips sees as Humphrey’s biggest mistake.

Phillips has been anything but quiet. It may have taken nearly two years, but he believes his goal of sending a message that there could be an alternative to the status quo has been achieved.

“I could have run again, but it didn’t feel right,” he said of his decision to not run for re-election to his seat. “To see what has transpired has been really gratifying, personally gratifying. It hasn’t been filled with a lot of public recognition, but that wasn’t the point. It was to call attention to something that I really felt that if we made the change, would result in what we’re feeling right now for Democrats, which is excitement and energy.”

During his short-lived run, he took heat from Democrats in and out of Washington. Gov. Tim Walz said Phillips was making a sideshow of himself. DFL Chair Ken Martin and U.S. Sen. Tina Smith mocked him for his loss in New Hampshire to Biden, who was a write-in candidate.

When he said Biden should not run two years ago, he said he publicly echoed what Democrats had been quietly saying since 2021 or even earlier.

“There’s no reward for it, even if you’re right,” he said, speaking of why other Democrats did not publicly speak out about the president’s physical decline earlier on.

After Biden’s poor performance in the June 27 presidential debate, what began with a handful of Democrats turned into a chorus before Biden announced he would step aside and unite behind Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21.

If Biden would have stayed in the race, Phillips thinks he would have lost in a “crushing landslide and the House and Senate with him.”

Phillips initially was reluctant to endorse Harris because he still believed there needed to be more competition in the Democratic field. But the overwhelming support Harris quickly consolidated eventually earned his support.

With Harris in the race, Phillips thinks Democrats are now “risking winning.” Recent polling has shown a close race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

“She’s done a really good job coming out of the gates, I think she’ll choose a great VP candidate, and I think it’s going to be a neck-and-neck race,” he said. “The numbers still say that Trump is more likely to win. That’s just true. But at least now we’re within striking distance.”

The congressman is supporting Walz for vice president.

Phillips isn’t ready to say what’s next. He doesn’t rule out running for president again as a Democrat or third-party candidate. “Never say never,” he said, though it’s not in his plans. After November, he’s ready to continue to embark on a “truth tour.”

“If people write anything, I just hope that they might write if [Biden] had debated me then and he had been on one stage, unscripted, with a national audience, and he demonstrated that decline then, this would have been very different circumstances,” he said. “And that’s what I was trying to do.”