The institutional Democratic Party has nobody to blame but itself for being saddled with a visibly decaying 81-year-old as their nominee. Democratic voters aren’t on the hook for this one — their leaders are.
Say what you will, and I’ve said it many times, about the foolhardiness of Republicans renominating Donald Trump for a third time: At least Republican voters were given no shortage of choices. A deep field of candidates challenged him, including his former vice president, two two-term sitting governors (one of them a former congressman presiding over the third-largest state), a two-plus-term sitting senator, and three former governors (all of them experienced in major federal office). Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and Chris Christie were all well-known figures in the national political conversation before running; DeSantis was widely viewed as the strongest possible challenger to Trump. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by their campaigns or on their behalf. The sitting Republican governors of the first two primary states endorsed Trump opponents, as did dozens of state legislators and influential outside groups. Even with Trump refusing to participate, his opponents met in five nationally televised debates. Trump himself started his campaign unprecedentedly early, held rallies, and spent huge sums of money running ads against his primary opponents. This was a democratic process. More than 4 million people cast votes against Trump, but at the end of the day, he won and won decisively.
The Democratic Party, as an institution, was determined to avoid anything like this, and they succeeded. The only candidates in the race initially were Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson, neither of whom had ever won an election. A venture capitalist named Jason Palmer ran, too, and actually won a contest in American Samoa. Biden refused to debate them, and the party organs and sympathetic media shunned them except to attack Kennedy. He eventually gave up, declared the system rigged (granted, like Trump, this is his answer for everything), and launched an independent bid. Nearly no notable elected Democrat endorsed any of Biden’s opponents. Little-known congressman Dean Phillips, to his credit, sacrificed his career to offer voters some choice. They deserved one: Polls regularly found that a great many Democratic primary voters (in many polls, a majority) believed that Biden should not even be running again. Phillips raised almost no money, in stark contrast to the A-list contenders on the Republican side. Hundreds of thousands of voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” as a protest in states where there was not a serious challenger.
Democrats had their reasons. Incumbency has advantages, which are lost if the incumbent is replaced with an untested national candidate. Biden had beaten Trump once. Every incumbent to face a serious primary challenge has lost; confusing correlation with causation, Democrats believed that they could avoid the problem by not having the primary. Biden’s status as a halting old white man who’s been in government forever and talks like a relic from a bygone age also makes him a perversely attractive frontman for a party increasingly driven on the ground by younger radicals.
Ordinary, rank-and-file Democratic voters wanted an alternative to Joe Biden because they could see what their leaders tried so hard to conceal: that old Joe, who had run as a one-term transitional figure in 2020, was no longer up to the task of another national campaign. If Democrats are led to the slaughter in November behind a feeble old man, it will not be because of their voters, but because their leaders denied them a choice in the matter.