Dean Phillips past and present: What you need to know about Biden's primary challenger

Dean Phillips has scooped ice cream, stocked grocery store shelves, spliced cable fiber for Comcast and disinfected patient rooms at a Minnesota hospital.

The U.S. representative has for the past two years traversed his district in southeastern Minnesota, working shifts at over 30 small businesses as part of a series called “On the Job with Dean.”

Now, as the multimillionaire mounts a challenge against President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, he’s taking the series on the road to better understand the challenges entrepreneurs and workers face across the country.

For Phillips, it’s illustrative of his entire approach to the 2024 campaign.

“The beautiful part is, you spend time with employees and then you spend time with the owners, and you listen to both of their issues,” Phillips said of the initiative, newly rebranded as “Putting Dean to Work.”

“It’s a bit of a metaphor for my campaign in the country, where there’s a disconnect sometimes between the people and the leaders,” he added.

Since launching his longshot presidential bid in October, Phillips has sought to woo moderate and liberal voters unsatisfied with Biden’s achievements and uneasy about the slate of GOP 2024 hopefuls. And he’s attempted to do it with a blend of business-minded savvy and pragmatic moderatism.

Much like the Putting Dean to Work series, the approach heavily draws from Phillips' past as a serial entrepreneur and three-term U.S. representative. Here’s a deeper look at those experiences and how they have impacted the 54-year-old’s perspective on the presidential campaign trail.

Phillips the businessman

After earning his MBA from the University of Minnesota, Phillips in 1993 became heir to his stepfather’s family business, Phillips Distilling Company, and led the multimillion-dollar organization until 2012.

Soon after stepping down, he became chair of Talenti, at the time a small-scale Texas gelato maker his family had invested in. It's products now can be found in grocery store aisles across the world.

Unilever, a multinational food company, later bought the brand in 2014. Phillips went on to start a cafe chain in the Twin Cities called Penny’s Coffee.

The experiences across large and small companies were eye-opening, Phillips told USA TODAY.

“In business, you only succeed if you get people, through great leadership, aligned,” he said. “I encouraged ideas in my businesses, whether it was manufacturing, going to the marketing people or the salespeople, administrative assistants, custodians.”

The idea that “good ideas come from everybody” has influenced his consensus-building mindset and belief that issues are “never black and white,” Phillips said.

When it comes to the economy, for instance, he argued he would push for both “pro-business and pro-labor” policies, though has not yet released specifics on what such plans would include.

“This notion that we can’t be pro-business and pro-labor is kind of sad because we can and should,” he said. “A lot of small businesses really struggle, and their employees are struggling to win. Everybody’s just trying to make it work.”

Phillips’ moderate political message

First elected to Congress in 2018, Phillips beat a six-term Republican incumbent, becoming the first Democrat to represent Minnesota’s staunchly red 3rd Congressional District in 50 years.

Since then, he has positioned himself as a pragmatic moderate legislator. In 2021, for instance, he served as vice chair of the bipartisanship-focused Problems Solvers Caucus and a year later, in 2022, was named the 13th most bipartisan member of the House for his work co-sponsoring legislation across party lines.

Among his most notable across-the-aisle policy achievements was the passage of the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act, which he co-sponsored with Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy in 2020 to extend small business loan programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Phillips described this ability to build consensus with Republican colleagues as his “secret sauce.”

As president, he has promised, he would take the commitment to bipartisanship one step further by building a “team of rivals” in the vein of former President Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet.

Unlike Lincoln’s Cabinet, which was composed of leaders of different Republican factions, Phillips has said, his would include leaders from across the political spectrum – conservative to progressive – to “ensure that there are people of multiple perspectives that represent multiple communities.”

However, while Phillips “celebrates any organization trying to find common ground,” he views efforts by groups like No Labels that are considering launching third-party consensus bids in the 2024 presidential election differently.

“Do I believe that both parties could use some competition down the road? Yes,” Phillips said, adding that, right now, with former President Donald Trump as the likely Republican nominee, he’s “afraid that the outcome will be tragic.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A look at Dean Phillips, Biden's 2024 primary challenger