Dean Phillips calls on Democrats to hold ‘immediate vote of confidence’ on Biden

Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who unsuccessfully mounted a primary challenge to Joe Biden earlier this year, has called on fellow elected Democrats to hold “an immediate vote of confidence” on the president and share the results directly with him.

Phillips’s idea – discussed Sunday in a Wall Street Journal column that he penned as well as repeated on US political talkshows – comes as Democrats find themselves locked in a crisis over Biden’s viability to win re-election in November, exposing deep fissures within party unity.

The congressman wrote that a “secret ballot” poll of House and Senate legislators was necessary because “fear of political retribution still prevents many members from speaking publicly”.

The Minnesota representative later told the CBS show Face the Nation that far more than 40 Democratic legislators who have publicly called for Biden to step aside or reconsider his re-election bid say the same privately.

Phillips told the station he still endorsed Biden “but it is time to step aside and turn this over to a new generation” and the president had an opportunity to become an “American hero” by taking the opportunity to step aside.

“This could be the most extraordinary opportunity we’ve had in generations to reset, re-energize and recommit and actually, not just change the narrative, which would really make Donald Trump upset, but to succeed, and I know the president recognizes that. I hope he concludes that quite soon,” Phillips said.

As Democrats hypothetically tease out a mechanism for finding a new presidential candidate should Biden step down, Phillips argued that a poll of elected officials is “far superior” than allowing the party apparatus to take control.

Phillips, along with self-help author Marianne Williamson, challenged Biden to a debate for the party nomination during the primary won handily by Biden. Both challengers were turned down by Biden and the Democratic National Committee, mirroring Donald Trump’s refusal to debate Republican primary challengers.

After making the 81-year-old Biden’s age an issue in his campaign, and offering himself as a new generation leader, Phillips ended his long-shot challenge in March.

The lack of primary debates with the two leading party candidates may have in turn set the stage for the shock to many voters that came with the Trump-Biden debate on 27 June.

“I publicly and privately urged well-known Democrats to enter the primary,” Phillips wrote. “Those appeals went unheeded while we sleepwalked into disaster.”

After entering the Democratic primary himself, he said he had hoped other entrants would force Biden to debate to “either demonstrate strength or allow Democrats ample time to select a replacement”.

Related: Joe Manchin calls on Biden to drop out of race: ‘Pass torch to a new generation’

In his column, Phillips said that effort was thwarted when “it became clear that I wasn’t competing only against the president but against a political machine designed to prevent competition, suppress challengers, and silence dissent”.

With Democrats now confronted with a reality that polling has found more than two-thirds of his party’s voters want Biden to withdraw, Phillips wrote he knew “it was only a matter of time until we would find ourselves in the circumstance now confronting us.”

“Suppressing the truth is a dangerous game,” he added, drawing a parallel between Democrats’ public and private support for Biden and similar Republican public-private conflicts over Trump, his 78-year-old presidential predecessor.

Phillips also wrote that it “appears the president remains unaware – or even ignorant – of the ominous public polling, tanking approval numbers, and dire sentiment sweeping the country”.