Text of Rep. Dean Phillips’ speech announcing his candidacy for president:

“I am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United States of America: the America that I love and the America that I know all of you love; the America that has shared refuge and has shared liberty and shared opportunity with so many millions, but is yet to fulfill its great promise to millions more. The America that has endured against all odds for almost 250 years as the longest-lasting Democratic Republic in the world.

But we, America's exhausted majority, we know that something is terribly, terribly wrong, for we face a crisis of cooperation, and we face a crisis of common sense; a crisis of community we face and of individual initiatives. We face a problem of participation and we face a problem of national priorities. For today's America spends more paying our debts of the past than we are investing in our children's future. A majority of our neighbors live paycheck to paycheck. Most can't afford a $400 car repair and about two-thirds are in the circumstance of living paycheck to paycheck, unable to get ahead and save for their dreams. Life for too many Americans is simply unaffordable. It is simply unaffordable. We find more for fighting than we do for feeding, corporations and the well-off — including me — enjoying more favorable tax treatment than hard-working American families. Too many of our children are hungry, and too many of our veterans are homeless. Anger and violence are rising and our life expectancy is falling. Gun violence ravaging our communities, including right next door in Maine. Eighteen American lives claimed by yet another massacre. That is why I'm running for president of the United States of America, because we cannot tolerate it any longer.

And I call on gun owners, I call on activists, I call on the exhausted majority to come together and save American lives.

America has no health care system, only sick care, and that care is more expensive right here in America than it is anywhere else in the entire world. We have no mental health care system here, only a system of greed and corruption. Chaos at our border and in our cities is growing, while our commitment to countering it is receding. Prices are way too high, medicines way too expensive, and diseases of despair are claiming our children through addiction and suicide.

We spend billions and billions sending our soldiers to foreign lands and still we have not fixed the failures in Flint. Americans have been so busy fighting one another that we have ceased fighting our greatest challenges.

So come on, America. I say, come on America. We are better. I know we are better. So let's do better.

It is time. It is time, my friends, it is time for we, the exhausted majority, to meet this moment. We will stand in the way of extremists who are hijacking America and large swaths of the entire world. We will need America back to its rightful and righteous place, both here at home and abroad.

And we the new generation. We will rise, not through war but through peace, and not just here but throughout the entire world.

These, these are the issues of the 2024 presidential election in the United States, and let me tell you, America, I am ready to get to work.

We will replace darkness with light, we will replace fear with optimism, and poverty with prosperity among you, the great people of the state of New Hampshire, who have been the very first to vet presidential candidates just like me for over 100 years, and whose motto, "Live Free or Die", speaks for every single American. I invite you to join me in declaring a new American independence, not from another nation or people, rather a new independence from fear and from the status quo. That road to a New American Century starts right here, and it starts right now.

I am running for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States because, my friends, it is time for a change and I am ready to lead our great nation to a secure and a more prosperous future. I do so, not in opposition to President Biden, who has my affection and my gratitude; rather with two core convictions that I am the Democratic candidate who can win, who can win the 2024 election. And second, it is time for the torch to be passed to a new generation of American leaders right here, all around the country and all around the world.

I've been a Democrat since I was 11 years old, and I believe deeply in the Democratic Party of today. For we believe, in the words of my hero, Hubert Humphrey, that the moral test of government is how it treats those in the dawn of life, in the dusk of life, and in the shadows of life.

I am a Democrat because I believe in America, I believe in the American people, and I believe it is time to walk from the shadows of darkness into the bright sunshine of the future, right here and right now.

So let us make that choice together, together, America, because I know and you know, if we affect change, our best days are yet to come. So I say our time is now and I say and — let's say it all together: what's my slogan? 1,2,3, 'Everyone's invited.'

I love you, America. Thank you, and let's get to work.”