The Internet Comes Together to Mock Dean Phillips’s Dumb Map

Tori Otten
·2 min read
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Representative Dean Phillips thought he’d made a pretty good point Wednesday about the political division in the United States, but the internet was quick to show him just how badly he’d messed up.

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions.

Phillips accompanied his tweet with what appeared to be an electoral map, which was indeed primarily red. But internet users were quick to point out that the map was massively misleading for two main reasons.

First, while the map makes it look like most people vote Republican, the areas that are blue actually have higher population numbers.

Second, the map isn’t even from the most recent election.

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”