Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, a few thoughts on President Biden’s weakening position with Democrats, and my interview with his new upstart primary challenger Dean Phillips, who says his colleagues in Congress are hiding their real concerns about Biden’s advanced age.

But first, a Capitol Hill update from Abby Livingston…

• Constant Conston: On Monday morning, the House G.O.P. political class sighed with relief when Politico reported that Dan Conston, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund (the House Republican leadership-aligned super PAC), will continue on this cycle. Conston is a well-known political consultant who’s spent his career on House campaigns and is currently in his third term at CLF.

  The news certainly reassured Republican donors who trust Conston, but the announcement also sent a broader signal to Republican consultants that I spoke with on Monday, who interpreted his continuation as a sign that the newbie speaker, who has scant fundraising experience, will leave much of Kevin McCarthy’s political operation intact.

  Amid the October tumult, Conston’s fate was one of the most widely speculated bits of intrigue. Today’s news telegraphed to nervous consultants and staffers that Johnson’s approach, at least so far, resembles Paul Ryan’s drama-free inheritance of John Boehner’s political infrastructure in 2015.

• Johnson’s Brain Trust: As with any speaker, Johnson is expected to install loyalists to oversee the House Republican industrial campaign complex, and his overnight ascension has thrust his tiny, mostly-unknown political network into positions of staggering power.

  His top two advisers are consultant Jason Hebert and chief of staff Hayden Haynes. As my partner Tara Palmeri noted last week, Hebert technically falls into Jeff Roe’s Axiom universe, but that’s due to Axiom’s acquisition of Hebert’s Louisiana-based company, The Political Firm, several years ago. Hebert’s relationship with Johnson, himself, goes back decades. (They were Kappa Sig fraternity brothers at L.S.U.) Hebert has a portfolio of several prominent Louisiana clients, including Garret Graves and Steve Scalise (with whom Hebert also shares a deep bond), and Louisiana-adjacent clients, such as Kevin Hern and Randy Weber.

  Haynes, meanwhile, began his career as an intern in David Vitter’s Senate office. After climbing the rungs of the Vitter operation, he shifted over to run Johnson’s first Congressional campaign in the 2016 cycle. Johnson’s kitchen cabinet is expected to expand over the next year.

• N.R.C.C. Stability: It also appears the House G.O.P. campaign arm will remain largely untouched. The committee’s leader, Richard Hudson, ran unopposed for the chairmanship last year, and Republicans I’ve talked to are confident in his hold over the committee, citing his 11-year tenure as a Hill staffer prior to his 2012 election to Congress.

  Hudson’s closest consultant adviser at the committee is Guy Harrison of OnMessage Inc., who came up through the ranks with Hudson when they were chiefs together in the Texas delegation. Moreover, Harrison was the committee’s executive director for two terms, including during the Republicans’ blockbuster 2010 cycle.

  Meanwhile, the N.R.C.C. trumpeted that it raised more than $500,000 in the days after Johnson became speaker. It’s much-welcomed news for a committee that has trailed far behind its Democratic counterpart this cycle. And the N.R.C.C. likely needs the boost: The committee’s October campaign finance report is expected to be a major curiosity after three weeks without a party leader.

October has brought with it a series of worrisome data points and heated criticisms from progressives, suggesting that Biden is in trouble with his own Democratic voters, even as he coasts (mostly) unchallenged to his party’s nomination next summer in Chicago. Biden’s approval ratings among Democrats have long been softer than they should be, notably among core groups like Black voters and Gen Z—a cohort that was underwhelmed with Biden well before the violence in Israel and Gaza erupted earlier this month. (This is a trend I’ve been documenting all year.) But the president’s stalwart support for Israel has apparently eroded his support even further among Gen Z voters, an age group that’s much more likely to side with the Palestinian cause than older Americans.

In fact, a new Gallup poll last week showed Biden’s approval rating among Democrats overall in the past month has dropped 11 points, down to 75 percent. That’s pushed his overall approval rating down to just 37 percent, reaching Trump-level depths of unpopularity. It might be the case that the Gallup survey is an outlier, but that seems unlikely given that the polling outfit was in the field for three full weeks in October, both before and after Israel began its retaliatory campaign against Hamas.

Given Biden’s spotty reputation with progressives, you might think Philips would be a progressive crusader running to Biden’s left. Instead, his voting record is almost completely aligned with Biden’s agenda. In fact, as Phillip was announcing his campaign in New Hampshire last week, he was greeted by some ready-to-go oppo from Biden-world: The Daily Beast reported that he aggressively fanboyed over the president on Air Force One during a 2021 trip to Minnesota. The point was to suggest that Phillips holds no principles—that he’s a sort of trust fund opportunist type who is only running for headlines, like R.F.K., Jr. minus the conspiracy theories.

So why is Phillips doing this, exactly? He is not a liberal insurgent in the mold of Eugene McCarthy, who also went to New Hampshire in 1968 to campaign against a president in his own party, Lyndon B. Johnson, in protest of the Vietnam war. (That movement famously opened the door for Robert F. Kennedy to join the ’68 campaign, and eventually forced Johnson to bow to anti-war fury and announce he would not run again.) Phillips has no obvious issue like Vietnam to distinguish himself from Biden. He even dodged twice when I asked him if he would support a ceasefire in Israel, a position that would easily help him carve out a space to Biden’s left among young voters.

When we spoke, Phillips had just visited the Laconia Pumpkin Festival, and was still basking in the afterglow of his campaign announcement and the sudden onrush of national media attention. “This is how it begins,” he told me. “I am participating in a time-proven process by which candidates introduce themselves. There is a path to winning New Hampshire, a need for it, a demand for it.” Time, though, isn’t exactly on Phillips’ side. He has little more than three months to introduce himself to voters before the primary, and few people outside of Wayzata have any idea who he actually is.

Math isn’t on his side, either. New Hampshire was stripped of its delegates by the Democratic National Committee because of its refusal to move its cherished first-in-the-nation primary date on the 2024 calendar, and for refusing to bend to the White House’s insistence that more diverse states like South Carolina and Michigan vote first. Phillips’ decision to make a stand in New Hampshire—which is almost 90 percent white—was not exactly well-received by Black Democrats, including Phillips’ colleagues in the House, who are in lockstep behind Biden. Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson mocked Phillips’s bid and said he is being “disrespectful” to Black voters.

“Any serious Democratic candidate would understand that Black voters are the backbone of the Democratic party,” Thompson told me in an email. “By bucking South Carolina to compete in a state that will offer zero delegates and does not reflect our party’s diversity, the Congressman from Minnesota is sending a clear message: He either does not know or does not care about the political power of Black voters. His bid is fruitless, and it’s disrespectful to the voters of color that have shown time and time again they understand what it takes to win a general election.”

But the Granite State, with its town hall traditions and contrarian impulses, has always been the right place to launch an underdog presidential campaign, Phillips told me. “I am going to be spending time listening to people, identifying their hopes and dreams. I come from the business world, and my special sauce is listening.” In his first few days of campaigning, Phillips said he was hearing all sorts of gripes from regular people about the state of the nation and their contempt for both political parties. He said one of his messages would be about “national repair”—not roads and bridges, per se, but fixing how people feel about their country. “All I hear in New Hampshire is people want change,” he said. “They don’t want a repeat of 2020. They don’t want either of the leading candidates being discussed.”

Phillips talks about Biden’s age with an air of conspiracy. He flatly called the president too old to serve, while also pausing a few times to say, “I want to be respectful.” Phillips said “there’s a culture of silence” among Democrats in Washington about Biden’s age. Many of his House colleagues, Phillips claimed, secretly want Biden to step aside, or hope that other Democrats step forward and run. But no elected official or Democratic strategist wants to say that publicly, he said, at the risk of running afoul of a sitting president.

I asked Phillips when these supposed concerns began. He told me a story about watching Biden speak to House Democrats behind closed doors, in 2021, as the White House was selling the Build Back Better plan to skeptical progressives in Congress. “The President appeared twice in front of the caucus to sell the BBB,” Phillips told me. “Those presentations were … jarring.” He paused, and I asked him what he meant. He paused again. “I want to leave it at that. Everybody who was in that room with me knows exactly what I am saying.” (I asked two Democrats who were in the room for those meetings what, exactly, Phillips was talking about, and they disputed his account).

While Phillip acknowledged that he and Biden “have few policy differences,” he did issue several criticisms about the president’s handling of the economy, saying that Biden and his team made a mistake with their “Bidenomics” branding. “The White House says the economy is strong. Well, that’s the single biggest disconnect between Washington and how people feel, the frustration over the economy,” Phillips said. “Affordability is the biggest issue that I am hearing. Affordability on health care, on housing.”

Phillips also sounded like a Republican at times. He said Biden has failed to do enough to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, and, offering his best Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan impression, that the government spends far too much money, creating a federal deficit that is “irresponsible” and “unforgivable.” Phillips also told me that if elected, he would invite Republicans to serve in his cabinet. “They should have a voice at the table,” he said. A member of the Squad, Phillips is not.

Phillips is promising to win, but he also said he invites the comparison to McCarthy, who changed the course of history by running in 1968 even if he had no shot at the nomination. McCarthy, also a Minnesotan, helped reveal that Johnson was vulnerable. “If I am the Eugene McCarthy of 2024, that would be a great legacy.” Phillips sounded genuine when he told me he wants other Democrats to join the race against Biden. “Competition is healthy,” he said. Phillips told me he personally called Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and asked them to run, but neither of them took or returned his calls.

“They didn’t answer,” he said.