There's Only One Way for Democrats to Prove They've Changed After the Joe Biden Debacle

The party has to get serious about moving beyond gerontocracy and admitting when its senior members need to move on.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

If you follow Democratic Party news, you’ve probably seen a lot of debate about Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

The book chronicles how Biden’s rapid aging and physical and cognitive decline was a sort of open secret in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party — yet nobody did anything about it. This resulted in Biden freezing up during a national debate with Donald Trump, being forced from the ticket, and handing off the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris, who ended up losing last year’s presidential election.

Thompson and Tapper have gotten an earful from all sides since publishing the book. On the right, many accused them of spending years engaged in their own downplaying of Biden’s issues; Democrats, on the other hand, are sick of seeing Biden criticized long after Trump has taken office.

Biden’s recent prostate cancer diagnosis has made this debate newly relevant — did the former president and/or aides also conceal this aspect of his health? It’s hard to even ask this question because the Democrats are just so deferential to all aspects of their leadership. This is something I noticed since I was a high schooler involved in Young Democrats clubs. The party sees debate as a slippery slope to chaotic infighting that only helps the Republicans.

You saw this in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, where basically nobody stepped up to challenge frontrunner Hillary Clinton, leaving that task to a then-obscure Vermont Senator. And you see it among the party’s lawmakers in the Congress.

This week, Virginia Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly passed away. This marked the third Democratic Member of Congress to simply die in office since Trump was elected in November. Yet anyone who tried to raise any issue about the health and wellbeing of these senior Members of Congress tends to be shouted down by the party.

Ken Klippenstein, the independent journalist, raised that issue some months back when Connoly was diagnosed with cancer. The chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party responded to Klippenstein noting that Connoly was terminally ill and yet chosen to be a ranking member of a powerful House oversight committee by telling him to “Delete yourself.” She assured her followers that Connolly would “kick cancer’s ass.”

It shouldn’t be taboo for a political party to be honest about something like a 75-year-old man being diagnosed with cancer. The goal of a political party is not to establish and protect a gerontocracy but to serve its members and the country more broadly. Yet the Democrats are notoriously averse to having honest debates about their leadership. There’s a reason the past 8 Members of Congress who died while in office were all Democrats.

David Hogg, the gun control activist who was elected a senior official in the national Democratic Party, has been engulfed in controversy since he dared to suggest that incumbent Democrats should face competitive primaries. But that shouldn’t be any surprise; the party is fearful of competition. Incumbents tend to just ignore primary challengers unless they seriously think they have a chance of losing. Joe Biden never debated Minnesota Democratic Congressman Dean Phillipps, but if he had maybe we would’ve all seen his condition far earlier than we did. Given Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman’s deteriorating state, a competitive primary might be the only way to avoid a redux of Biden’s path ahead of the 2028 Senate campaign.

To really prove that they have learned from their Joe Biden mistake, the Democratic Party needs to be more, well, democratic. As I wrote in the days after the 2024 election, this also applied to the Kamala Harris debacle:

My hope is that Harris’s loss might prompt the Democratic Party to reflect on its own name. Founded by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as an anti-elite vehicle, the party of what they called “the democracy” is supposed to embrace, well, democracy. That means elevating people to the highest levels of power only after robust debate, fierce competition, and the consent of rank-and-file members.

By installing a candidate without convictions, the Democrats have lost yet another winnable election to Trump—a deeply flawed man whom a capable opponent could have easily overcome. If they want to win again in four years, Democrats need to learn to trust the American people and the democratic process. That means a robust presidential primary and candidates who are fully transparent about their strengths and weaknesses. The Democratic Party lost this election by abandoning democracy. It can retake the White House in four years by learning to love it again.

This will require a cultural change in the Democratic Party that results in incumbents constantly having to prove that they are both fit and representative of the voters they are called on to serve, rather than simply shouting down dissidents and challengers. It will be an uphill battle, given how entrenched the culture of deference is in the party. But it will be a battle well-worth fighting, because it’s the only thing that can prevent another Biden debacle.