Dems’ age issue
Activists weigh whether to embrace young choice or nominate a veteran
Party activists are grappling with whether to embrace a younger candidate for president or tap a veteran.
Diana Martinez, 70, looked at Beto O’rourke, 46, and made her choice: It was time for Generation X to fix this country.
“Doesn’t he remind you of Kennedy?” Martinez said as O’rourke offered firm handshakes and music recommendations to a coffeehouse crowd. “He’s young. That’s what it’s going to take to try and beat Trump.”
Some closer to O’rourke’s age were less convinced. Standing near the back, Erin Cruz, 41, sized up O’rourke — and then praised septuagenarian socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“I’m looking for someone to be as progressive as Bernie,” Cruz said.
Actually, she amended, perhaps just Bernie himself.
O’rourke entered the Democratic primary race last week with an aspirational pitch and a semi-improvisational tour of Iowa, broadcasting his message of generational uplift and immediately thrusting age into the currents of the 2020 race.
The contenders leading in initial polls, Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden, will be 79 and 78 by Inauguration Day 2021. President Donald Trump will be 74.
Yet as party activists begin to appraise the field, they are already grappling with whether to once again embrace a younger candidate who ref lects the future or shrug off age and elevate a veteran politician who most represents their craving for undiluted liberalism and someone who can thwart Trump.
If history is a guide, O’rourke and other Democrats betting on a youthful appeal — like Cory Booker, 49; Julian Castro, 44; or Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard, both 37 — should have an advantage. Of the last five Democratic presidents, only Lyndon B. Johnson, who ascended to the job because of the assassination of a 46-year-old president, was older than 52 when he was first elected president.
But for many in the party, dedication to this critical component of past success — putting forward a new face — is being tested in the 2020 race by twin impulses: the devotion to Sanders among voters many decades younger than him, who share his belief that American society is rife with inequities that will not be solved by candidates like O’rourke, and an overriding desire among Democrats to defeat a president they believe is a menace to democracy.
Supporters of Sanders believe he offers transformational change and brings experience that would help him survive a general election and expand the electorate.
At the same time, moderates in the party are tempted by Biden, wagering that the political equivalent of comfort food to America may prove the safest recipe.
This combination of a primary electorate that is at once hungry for structural, even radical, reform and deeply nervous about nominating someone too callow to defeat Trump poses perhaps the most serious challenge to a candidate like O’rourke. He shuns ideological labels, even chafing at “progressive” in the past; often avoids being pinned down on policy; and has no experience in the crucible of presidential politics.
O’rourke has ample time to f lesh out his agenda — he spoke fondly, if not always specifically, last week of “bold, progressive ideas” — and he enjoys considerable assets: a history of recordshattering online fundraising, the appeal of celebrity in a country besotted by fame and a grip on the imagination of a party that loves to fall in love after his star-making-if-campaign-losing Senate race in Texas.
But he is facing a 2020 campaign and election that differ considerably from when Democrats last rewarded a generational argument in a presidential race by nominating then-sen. Barack Obama.
“There’s still a big part of the party that wants to fall in love, and there’s another part of the party that will settle for anything that will beat Trump,” said Sen. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut, at 45 the youngest Democratic senator. “I think that’s a real, daily tension in the party that’s going to play out in real time.”
There could ultimately be a best-of-both-worlds solution —
“It just happened that in 2008 and 2012 we fell in love with the most electable candidate,” Murphy recalled — but like many Democrats, he could only guess for now.
“I would generally make the case that the Democratic Party should always be nominating the next-generation candidate, except I’m not sure any of the old rules apply,” he said.
“I want to support someone who I think really has a chance of winning,” said Brandon Greene, 27, a student and pastor. “We can’t take a gamble on a new candidate.”
And Tasha Horton, 45, a real estate broker with college-age children who “love the Bern,” allowed that her “love is for Kamala but strategically it’s either Bernie or Biden.”