Why Dems Lack Leadership Right Now

You Can Blame Joe Biden....sort of.

Incumbent Presidents who are finishing their first terms almost always win their party’s nomination to run again. It’s not an iron clad rule of politics, but it’s about as close to one as you can get. Had Joe Biden been 20 years younger going into 2024, there would have been no question that he was indeed going to be the Democratic Nominee. There wouldn’t have even been a second thought about it. Sure, you’d get the same D.C. parlor talk claptrap about possible challenges¹ but Biden was going to be the nominee. Period.

However, Biden wasn’t 20 years younger, and as the calendar turned from 2022 to 2023 many wondered when he would announce he was stepping down from another run. The later in the calendar it went, the more he raised his fist and barked “You’re darn right I’m still running!” You’d expect that from a President, but we’re facing practical facts here; being in your 80s doesn’t make you physically on your toes for the gauntlet you have to run through to win an election. By late 2023, it was apparent he was committed to running as the Democratic Nominee and people questioned the wisdom in such a decision. He was older, slower, more physically frail. Running for President is a marathon and a non stop sprint.

Midway through summer following a horrific debate with Donald Trump and a scathing op-ed by George Clooney shining light on the facts of the matter, Biden stepped down. In the hours following the announcment, the party solidified behind his Vice President, Kamala Harris. Her loss is one of the reasons the Democratic Party seems so adrift right now. But it’s more than that; all the events leading to this is just one other laid track on the railroad to this nowhere void in the Dem Party.

Here are the details why:

1. Let’s first go back all the way to 2016, when Hillary Clinton was seen as a strong candidate clearing the field of everyone but Bernie Sanders. Bernie made a strong showing of it but ultimately lost. The consolation prize was that Bernie became a powerful voice within the Democratic Caucus. After Hillary’s loss to Trump, Bernie was the only Democrat coming out of that year in a better position than before.

2. Biden won the primary season in 2020 as a hastily chosen compromise candidate. Everyone recognized this was Joe’s last shot. His numbers were in the toilet as more photogenic and energetic upstarts sucked up all the oxygen. It wasn’t until he got the endorsement of Jim Clyburn in anticipation of the South Carolina primary that the momentum swung in Joe’s favor and the other candidates immediately aligned behind him. And just like that, three primaries into the season, the Democrats had their nominee and the season was over. Most prefered someone else, but he was someone everyone could grudgingly rally around against the horrible Donald Trump.

3. Biden ensured there was no primary process in 2024. Primaries not only pick the candidate to be the nominee, but help showcase other leaders in the party and build up the bench of potential leaders for the elections to come. When Biden decided to run, the field and fundraising cleared for every other possible candidate, and nobody wanted to contest Joe for fear of making him look weaker than he already was.²

4. Biden personally selected Kamala Harris as his V.P. back in 2020. This is not a slight on Harris per se, but she had flamed out spectacularly in the primaries that year, well before the first votes were even cast. She only had a real base of support in her home state of California, not much elsewhere across the country. Voters didn’t select her to be VP, they voted for the top of the ticket. By the time she ran in 2024, she had 100% name identification, and not much else to fall back on; few knew much about her and what they had heard was generally not positive.³

5. The party aligning around Harris immediately (which actually was just a couple weeks before the Democratic National Convention), prevented primary voters and activists within the party from having a say as to who should be the nominee. To be sure, the timing was awful, and logistically a nightmare. A decision had to be made fast. Nonetheless, the party could have done what news networks have craved for decades; an open convention with intense intrigue about what was going on in the backrooms and the dealmaking that was occurring. Frankly, it would have been must-watching, and the outcome likely would have been the same, but it’s not what careful crafted message handlers want from a convention. The thing is that primaries and such contests help smooth over and demonstrate political power within the party, and where the strenghts and weaknesses are. No such contest meant that there was no established power center, except for what existed for Harris’s campaign.

6. All of this is occurring during a period where there is a generational turnover in leadership. Nancy Pelosi had previously stepped down as Speaker to Hakeem Jeffries, and there is already talk of someone replacing Chuck Schumer. Younger representatives are moving in as older ones step down.

7. When Harris lost the election, there was nobody from the past 8 years in a position to take up the mantle as a current or immediate future leader of the party. The emptiness of the process from the past eight years had finally come home to roost.

And it’s these reasons leading to this current void of indifference and lack of leadership direction in the party. When you think of it, there hasn’t been a serious open primary, where there were serious and open discussions about various issues and platform proposals, since 2008 when Obama emerged as the candidate. But it wasn’t just him emerging from that; the Democratic Party had a particularly strong group of individuals running that year, and many of them went on to be vocal leaders within the party for the next decade.

And as if to underscore the issue, the people whose names are thrown around as leaders of the party are the same ones thrown around five years ago during the 2020 primaries. There remains Harris herself, but as for others, there won’t really be a sense of someone taking the reins of the party until another primary season, almost 3 years from now. Until then, they’ll puff themselves up as leaders of the party, but in truth, nobody will really know how representative they are and how much the party backs them until the primary votes start being cast. That’s a long time to be leaderless.

It’s also a main source of the rational ambivalence of most party big names, not jumping out and taking a stand on a lot (other than anything anti-Trump). They don’t know what their own constituencies really want—is it more hardcore liberalism/ progressivism or is it a broader tent and more control? Is it a moderate viable option, or is it a strong alternative crying out to the masses? Most established D.C. Dems are avoiding from having to make a decision at all and kind of playing to both sides as much as they can, hoping sooner or later a path emerges.

One thing is for certain; until someone steps up to the mic and strikes a chord, we’re going to be like this for awhile.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

For a long time it was rare for a candidate to become President without previously having run for higher office before. That all changed when a young JFK in 1960 won his party’s nomination and the White House. It is no coincidence that his political rise aligned with the rise of national television broadcasts, and also the rise of primaries in deciding candidates over the smoke filled rooms. Since then we’ve had Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Trump all having become President without ever having run for President or Vice President prior to that.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

It’s been said in American politics, “Republicans fall in line, Democrats want to fall in love.” The past few elections, since 2016 at least, the trend has been the opposite, with disastrous results all around. Here’s hoping the Democrats fall in love with a candidate again sooner rather than later.

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. And FYI, there almost always IS at least one challenger supported by party brass. This is because it helps bring some needed attention to what otherwise is a lackluster primary season if there is nothing contested, and it results in a nice bump up in fundraising throughout the early months of the year.

2. It should be mentioned that there was one person who basically told the truth about all of it and ran against Biden; Dean Phillips. His campaign went nowhere fast, and he’s now wrongfully suffering in electoral purgatory because of it.

3. For this I fault more the role of VP over Harris herself. The VP gets sent to do photo ops and handle issues that the President doesn’t want to go near if he can help it. So for Harris, that meant Immigration and a rotating list of ugly issues, warts and all. This is why VPs almost NEVER become President immediately following their stint as VP.