The congressman challenging President Biden in the Democratic primaries, Dean Phillips, is unleashing Bigfoot. His commercial featuring the mythical beast injects levity into a dark election year and the upstart hopes it will help him shake the White House on Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

According to an American Research Group poll last week, Mr. Phillips has surged to 28 percent last week from just two percent when he entered the race in late October. On the one hand, Mr. Biden stands at a commanding 58 percent. On the other hand, his approval rating in the state is underwater at 38 percent. 

“I’m something of an expert on elusive creatures,” an actor playing Bigfoot in Hollywood-quality makeup says in Mr. Phillips’ commercial, “so I challenged myself to find President Biden in New Hampshire during this primary season.”

Bigfoot says, “I thought I was good at hiding.” He reckons that Mr. Biden is better. “How can you have tens of thousands of people looking for you all the time and not one person find you?” He describes looking for the president in vain while “this guy, Dean Phillips” is “everywhere.”

The reason for Mr. Biden’s absence from the hustings is that the DNC has made South Carolina the first official primary of 2024, rewarding its role in delivering Mr. Biden the 2020 nomination after losses in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

The DNC has judged New Hampshire’s contest “non-compliant” with the new rules. It says the rules render Tuesday’s results “meaningless.” Their delegates won’t be admitted to the 2024 Democratic National Convention at Chicago in August.

As a result of the DNC’s punishment, Mr. Biden isn’t among the 21 Democratic candidates appearing on New Hampshire’s ballot, making him the first incumbent president to be absent from the slate since President Lyndon Johnson.

In 1968, LBJ, like Mr. Biden, was confident of winning renomination and relied on a write-in campaign to ensure he prevailed. “Now,” Bigfoot says, taking aim at those campaigners, “some big-money super PAC is telling us to vote for” Mr. Biden. “Why write him in when he’s written us all off?”

Eugene McCarthy, a senator of Minnesota — the first Democratic candidate to falter on the Vietnam War — also waged an asymmetric campaign in 1968. With just $450 in his coffers, he entered the race, and Johnson ignored him, too, tempting fate.

McCarthy ended up winning 42 percent in New Hampshire. Johnson prevailed with 50 percent. The results, though, were enough to shake him. He soon announced that he wouldn’t be a candidate for reelection. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, went on to capture the nomination.

Humphrey was crowned at a tumultuous convention, also at Chicago. It was marred by protests from the left like — at least in some ways — those Mr. Biden is facing over his support for Israel in its war against Hamas. The weakened Democratic vice president went on to lose to President Nixon.

In 1992, a Republican challenger, Patrick Buchanan, also came in second in the New Hampshire primary against an incumbent, President George H. W. Bush. Mr. Buchanan earned 40 percent of the vote to Bush’s 58 percent, delivering what the New York Times called “a jarring political message.”

Bush also fell short of reelection and, in another parallel, both 1968 and 1992 featured third-party candidates — the former Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, and the businessman, H. Ross Perot respectively. That history is on track to repeat this year with another Democrat-turned-independent, Robert F. Kennedy, having thrown his hat in the ring.

The No-Labels Party also plans to stand a candidate. In an interview with the New York Times on Saturday, Mr. Phillips said for the first time that he’d consider accepting their nomination. A strong showing in New Hampshire could increase the chance that he’d make the jump.

Bigfoot says that Mr. Phillips “actually cared about what people were telling him” and that “a politician that cares” is “scarcer than Joe Biden in New Hampshire.” With more than 101,000 views, primary voters are hearing the mythical Sasquatch’s argument. On Tuesday, they’ll have a chance to again send to a president a message of dissatisfaction that is unmeaningless.