Amy Walter:
Yes, I do think that the point, Tam, is that voters had been making it very clear, Democratic voters had been making it very clear for weeks, months, maybe even a couple of years that they thought that Biden was too old for the job.
And when you hear Democrats criticize Republicans, often they say, look, Republicans have put personality, Donald Trump’s personality, or the party ahead of the country, and that we, as Democrats, they say, would never do that.
But it’s become pretty clear that they did just that, which is their concerns, whatever concerns that many around Donald Trump had, the concerns they were hearing from their own constituents wasn’t enough for them to stand up and say, hey, we should do something. We should either, one, get a serious primary challenge to Donald Trump, or two, organize enough Democrats to go to the president and ask him not to run for election.
That didn’t happen. So if you were running in 2028, what is you have a base of voters who are disappointed, dispirited, and really distrustful of the system. Many voters we talked to during the 2024 campaign, you would hear them say, especially younger voters, the system seems so broken and nobody is really trying to fix it. Instead, they’re doing all they can to protect the establishment.
I think, if you were running in 2028, not only do you need to acknowledge that, but, as a Democrat, you would need to say, here are the ways in which we will be more courageous in standing up truth to power, as well as the authenticity of that individual candidate and ways in which they will challenge accepted institutional beliefs or systems.
