As he gears up for his reelection bid, President Joe Biden has so far avoided serious competition in the Democratic primary and has otherwise consolidated support among the party’s elected officials, including those on his left that aspired to beat him in 2020.

But on Sunday, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips made the case for a substantial primary challenge to the sitting president and declined to rule out a run of his own.

“I have not decided yet,” the Minnesota Democrat said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “I think I'm well-positioned to be President of the United States. I do not believe I'm well-positioned to run for it right now. People who are should jump in because we need to meet the moment. The moment is now.”

“I’m not saying I will,” he added. 

In an interview with a local CBS affiliate in Minnesota on Sunday, Phillips pitched moderate Democratic governors or Biden administration officials as better candidates to primary Biden.

“I’ve got 60,000 Twitter followers and $250,000 in my campaign account… this is not my time perhaps,” Phillips told the outlet. “There are an extraordinary number of Democrats who are unfortunately waiting on the bench.”

On “Face the Nation,” Phillips repeatedly argued that competition within the Democratic Party was necessary and said that the central issue facing the nation in the 2024 election cycle was “turning the page to the future.” 

Phillips did not name specific candidates he would like to see run against Biden in either of the Sunday interviews. Politico reported last month Phillips was set to meet with donors in New York City to discuss a potential primary challenge. 

Democrats don’t want a “coronation, but they want a competition,” Phillips said, citing a New York Times/Siena College poll from last week that found 50% of Democratic primary voters would prefer their party to nominate someone besides Biden, with 45% saying they preferred the president. The national poll queried just 296 Democratic primary voters.

Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain, who worked for the president on and off for decades, disputed Phillips’ characterization.

“It’s not a coronation, it’s a coalition of Democrats coming together,” Klain wrote on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

Among those who preferred someone else in the Times/Siena poll, 39% cited age as the number one reason that the 80-year-old Biden should step aside and 14% said they simply preferred someone new. Only 20% of Democratic primary voters polled said they were enthusiastic about Biden’s reelection bid.

“If we don't heed that call, shame on us and the consequences I believe we're gonna be disastrous,” Phillips warned. “So my call is to those who are well-positioned, well-prepared, have good character and competency — they know who they are — to jump in, because Democrats and the country need competition. It makes everything better.”

So far Biden’s primary competition has taken form in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Kennedy family scion and vaccine conspiracy propagator, and Marianne Williamson, the 2020 presidential candidate and spiritual leader. In public polling, Williamson mostly clocks in at single digits and Kennedy in the mid-teens. 

While Phillips said he was happy to see support for a primary challenger, he viewed Kennedy — who has spouted bigoted conspiracies and garnered praise from leading Republican presidential candidates — as not a Democrat.

“I think he's using a very similar playbook to a former president who did the same in the Republican Party just a little while ago. And I think we should be cautious of that,” Phillips said of President John F. Kennedy’s nephew. “I also think that's why we need alternatives.”

According to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s polling average in a Democratic primary has hovered in the mid-60s since he officially announced his campaign, a relatively low mark for a sitting president. Phillips said he believed Biden could beat former President Donald Trump again, but that “the only way to determine that objectively” is through a rigorous primary process.

“I want to tell you this about President Biden: an amazing man. I love the man. He is competent, he is honorable, his integrity, I believe, is unvarnished, he has led this country through extraordinarily difficult times,” Phillips said. “This is not about him. This is about listening to people.”

Late last month, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a close ally of Biden’s and the co-chair of his 2024 campaign, said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that a potential Phillips challenge “doesn’t have me nervous” and said the congressman “can’t cite anything like” Biden’s legislative successes. 

A lifelong Democrat and ideological centrist, Phillips ruled out a third party bid and pitched a vision of a bipartisan political future for the United States, noting the “camaraderie” he felt in the CBS News green room with former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, an anti-Trump candidate in the Republican presidential primary. 

“I've discovered that everybody in the middle, the massive majority of Americans, are sick of angertainment telling us we're more divided than we really are. They're sick of members of Congress state houses attacking each other instead of attacking problems,” the centrist Democrat said. “They want their families back, their friendships back, their communities back, they want unity. And I want to give voice to them.”

A bipartisanship index maintained by The Lugar Center and Georgetown University ranked Phillips as the 13th most bipartisan member of Congress in 2021.

The tumult in recent years is a “quagmire” facing the American people, the third-term congressman argued, comparable to the Vietnam War — a war that killed his father and sparked another Minnesota Democrat, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, to launch a primary challenge against a sitting Democratic president in 1968.

“I want to remind the American people that's the Vietnam of right now. The quagmire in which we find ourselves, we will not get out of from a single leader,” Phillips said. “If everybody takes a pause, starts reaching out their hands to one another, again, starts electing and selecting people of competency and good character, we're going to get out of this and I'm optimistic.”

The last two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, did not face serious primary challenges during their reelection bids. Before that, Jimmy Carter faced a serious challenge from Kennedy’s uncle, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, in 1980 that lasted until the second day of the Democratic National Convention.