The saying about presidential elections used to go that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. These days, Republicans seem to do both and Democrats do neither.
On the Republican side, the prospect of a lively 2024 presidential primary turned out to be pure political mirage. Forget the supposed Ron DeSantis insurgency. Forget the buy-my-book GOP primary debates last year. The Republican ticket was always former President Donald Trump’s if he wanted it. And he did, as it turned out. The best his nearest intraparty challenger, Nikki Haley, could do was to win the Washington, D.C., Republican primary, which I’m pretty sure is just a show of hands at a political consultant’s dinner table, and also Vermont.
Republicans both swooned for, and then fell in lockstep behind, a third chance for Trump. Yet, on the other side, things are far more unsettled. As far back as last summer, there were murmurs of mutiny in the Democratic camp, with anonymous strategists panicking in Politico about President Joe Biden’s stagnant poll numbers and general tendency to get lost at the mall. These whispers were dismissed by the Biden camp as “bed-wetting,” yet the monster under the mattress never went away: Come the fall of 2023, Biden’s Gallup approval rating was stuck at 37%.
Then came the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. What initially seemed like a stately opportunity to reunite the country against terrorism — Biden’s speech a week after the slaughter crackled with outrage — begat a political nightmare. The Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip infuriated the same young voters Biden needs to win in November, forcing him to walk a slender tightrope between maintaining the U.S.-Israeli friendship and chiding the Netanyahu government. It did little good on either side. The war continued unabated while a recent CNN poll found an astonishing 71% of voters disapprove of Biden’s policy on Gaza. A full 62% of those ages 18-34, per CNN, are dissatisfied with both 2024 presidential candidates.
These are break-glass numbers for any candidate and enough to erase any progress Biden might have made with his relatively well-received State of the Union address. In a parallel universe, the solution for Democrats might have been seamless: Buy a couple cartons of ice cream, stage an intervention, and tell Biden it’s time to let his veep take over the ticket. Yet in our own timeline, that vice president is Kamala Harris, one of the most disliked human beings in the United States. As political consultant Doug MacKinnon wrote in the Hill earlier this year, “I have spoken to multiple high-level Democrats, and not one of them wants Harris on the ticket.” Not just at the top of the ticket — on the ticket at all.
Yet even then, this need not be a disaster for Democrats. There’s still the entire elected Democratic Party for them to draw upon. In theory, all they’d need to do is find some Democratic governor or senator free of the taint of grocery prices and Gaza and have Biden anoint him or her heir.
But then that’s just the problem. Even if Biden were willing to step aside, where would that replacement come from?
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After former President Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, he famously declared that “elections have consequences.” It was a tough reality check for a trounced GOP but hardly unprecedented: George W. Bush, after winning in 2004, pronounced, “I have political capital. I intend to spend it.” Yet as Bush quickly discovered, and as Obama would soon realize, politics is never quite that simple.
Propelled by anxieties over Obamacare and big government, Republicans crushed Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, turning in their biggest gains since the 1994 Republican Revolution. Obama won reelection two years later, and Democrats maintained narrow control of the Senate, but the House remained decisively in Republican hands. In 2014, Democrats’ senatorial advantage would be wiped out too, with Republicans capturing a 54-44 Senate majority. And in 2016, Trump would win the presidency, resulting in total GOP control of the elected federal government.
Elections do have consequences, and the single biggest consequence of these elections was to deny the Democrats a generation of political talent. Out of these victories came relatively young Republican senatorial upstarts such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Deb Fischer (R-NE), and Tim Scott (R-SC). Later wins would add Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Katie Britt (R-LA). And while a Senate Democratic Caucus that includes Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) can hardly be called a nursing home, the average Republican senator is three years younger than the average Democrat, a gap that was nonexistent in 2009.
The same holds true in the House of Representatives. Just 22% of the House was elected before 2010, and of those old-timers, nearly twice as many are Democrats as Republicans, according to an NBC News tally after the 2022 elections. This isn’t to say there aren’t any fresh Democratic faces in the lower chamber, starting with the so-called Squad of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). But no one seriously thinks any of them would be an asset on a presidential ticket (Pressley hails from the ninth-bluest district in America, according to the Cook Political Report). Biden’s lone Democratic primary challenger this year was a Minnesota congressman named Dean Phillips, and almost no one knows who he is.
Among the governors, Democrats have made up ground in recent years, bringing the count almost to parity with 27 Republican governors and 23 Democrats. But many of these Democratic governors are new and still serving out their first terms. Six years ago, following the 2016 elections, there were 33 Republican governors and only 18 Democrats. This capped off a trend in the 2010s of Republicans dominating at the state level: After 2016, the GOP controlled 68 state legislature chambers compared to just 31 controlled by the Democrats.
Some of this boils down to those old imbalances of geography that Democrats love to gripe about. Republicans tend to win in more states with fewer people, while Democrats control coastal strongholds that are more populated but result in fewer seats. But then that’s how the system works, like it or not. The fact remains that Democrats during the 2010s never found a way to counter the rising Tea Party and later Trumpist enthusiasm in flyover country. The result has been a farm system for Republicans that’s outhustled anything on the Democratic side. GOP state legislators have become House members, House members have run for Senate or governor, and senators and governors have positioned themselves as presidential material.
So while the 2024 Republican presidential primary debates might have been a pointless exercise in insult comedy (minus the comedy), they still featured some promising elected talent, including Scott, Haley, and DeSantis. Whatever you think of them, and whatever happens to Trump this year, the Republicans’ future looks bright, at least from a personnel standpoint.
Whereas besides the invisible Phillips, the best standbys Democrats have mustered are Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI). Neither should be dismissed out of hand, but both bring some serious baggage from their COVID-19 days. And while Newsom has done much to create jobs, those jobs are all in Texas. That’s another problem for the Democrats’ farm team. Who looks upon California or Connecticut and thinks: This is a success worth running on?
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Perhaps to dream of an alternate Democratic ticket is to game the presidential race too much. Both Newsom and Whitmer have campaigned and fundraised for Biden, and while both are believed to harbor presidential ambitions, their sights seem set on 2028 rather than 2024. Biden has made clear that he’s running, full stop, regardless of who else is on hand and his own personal disadvantages. “Four more years!” Biden declared during an April speech in Washington, D.C. He then proceeded to read the word “pause” off the teleprompter.
But again, Biden’s obstinacy isn’t the only problem here. Even if he were to stand down, there simply isn’t anything on the Democratic side like the long menu of choices Republicans have.
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There was, briefly, a hope for Democrats looking to pass the torch to a new generation. In 2018, something called Beto-mania swept the nation. It was kind of like Beatlemania but with shoutier lyrics about gun owners getting arrested. A whippersnapper by the name of Robert “Beto” O’Rourke announced he was running for Senate against Cruz, and here was a dream scenario for Democratic talent agents. Beto was a young kid from a red state with a Kennedy hairdo who passionately supported gun control. What more could you ask for? Reporters panted about how O’Rourke was drawing out massive crowds in the Texas heat. The writer Elizabeth Wurtzel hailed him as a kind of Gen X political standard-bearer.
O’Rourke was then beaten by Cruz, watched his 2020 presidential run fizzle, and lost the 2022 gubernatorial election to Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX). Beto-mania became just another series of holds for Republicans — and another reminder that Democrats’ benches had thinned, especially in red and purple states.
Matt Purple is a writer and editor whose work has been featured in the Washington Examiner, the American Conservative, the Spectator, and many others. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.
