Where Do Democrats Go If Biden Loses?

The paths forward for the party if it loses it all. Again.

Last week, we looked at where Republicans might go if Donald Trump loses the 2024 election. Befitting the party’s status as more of a mass-scale cult than an actual political organization, those hypotheticals were dominated by continuity rather than change. The former president’s well-documented ability to come out of career-ending scandals and setbacks completely unscathed among his base makes it hard to imagine that even something as crushing as a second consecutive presidential loss could loosen his grip on the party. As such, most of the possible outcomes were various continuations of Trump and Trump-style politics, with alternative options like Nikki Haley only considered real contenders in a scenario where Trump is running from a jail cell.

This article will be nowhere near as constrained. Despite the best efforts of some very strange teenagers online and people who made a Linkedin page before their first dating profile, the Democratic Party is (mostly) not a cult of personality around Joe Biden. It is still a more-or-less normal political party, with different factions representing different constituencies with very different priorities. The fault lines dividing them are just as obvious as ever, and Biden’s ability to keep them united has only ever rested on one thing: defeating Trump. If he fails at this, his grip will break, he will be tossed aside, and the party will break out into open warfare at a scale that will make the fights that followed 2016 look like nothing.

Who will be the contenders in these battles? Which faction has the best chance of winning the 2028 nomination and defining the future of the party? Read below to find out.

Contender #1: The White House-in-Exile

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. More than three decades younger than his boss.

Across the history of American political parties, the most fascinating stories are always those of massive change: how one faction used the opportunity presented by a defeat to reshape their party and, eventually, the country. It’s these cycles that have defined the course of American political history, and it’s entirely possible that a second loss to Trump could cause Democrats to finally go through one again.

Entirely possible—but not entirely guaranteed. For as often as crushing defeats have led to dramatic party restructurings in American history, they can just as often lead to retrenchment. Losses, even terrible losses, do not cause dominant factions to disappear. Even as they’re driven out of power, they still exist and still wish to keep their control—and they often succeed in doing so. For every Reagan, Clinton, and Trump in American history, there is also a Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, and, well, Joe Biden. As boring as it may be, it is far from uncommon for a party establishment to manage to hold their footing in the wake of a crushing loss. And if the Democratic establishment could pull this off after Trump’s first victory, who’s to say they couldn’t do it again? What should stop them from staving off the threat of a progressive ascendency, an anti-woke regression, or a wine mom coup d'état and running one of their guys (or gals) for the fourth cycle in a row?

At the risk of tempting fate, the answer to that final question is this: quite a lot. The aftermath of a Trump 2024 victory, whatever the size, would be far, far different from what occurred following his victory in 2016. To understand why, it’s important to understand how the Democratic establishment itself has changed since their brutal loss that year. Back then, Trump’s win was a massive shock to everybody on both sides of the aisle and all quadrants of the political spectrum. Nobody, not even the man himself, saw his rise coming in advance, making it hard to blame the Democratic establishment alone for it—especially when they were only the second political establishment he had crushed just that year. With things so uncertain, Democratic voters rallied around familiar figures. Institutional titans like Nancy Pelosi and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, not the rabble-rousing Cassandras who opposed Clinton in 2016, were made into symbols of hope and defiance. In the end, and despite some losses on the way, the establishment’s position would only be strengthened, allowing them to win the nomination even more easily than they did in 2016.

The situation could not be more different now. After years in office, Trump has been transformed from a completely novel wild card into one of the most predictable figures in modern politics. A victory for him is entirely foreseeable and, in light of consistent Democratic wins over the past few election cycles, completely inexcusable. Everything about this administration, from its domestic policies to its foreign policies to how it talks to who it hires, has been oriented around making America Trump-proof. Because of this, nobody will ever look at the Biden White House as babes in the woods, overtaken by a black swan event nobody should have ever expected. They will see a class of people who made banishing Trump their political raison d'être and failed in the most profound possible way.

Due to the remarkable lack of turnover that has characterized the Biden administration, all of the culprits here will be easy to name and blame. Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, and all of the other WestExec alumni who make up the backbone of this administration and have formalized its diplomatically hawkish, politically cautious, and economically pro-labor and pro-spending outlook will be rightfully marked as generational failures. And even if they do manage to come out of a loss with their reputations intact, they will find themselves without any political vessels. None of them have been politicians in any capacity before, making direct runs infeasible. Biden himself, now in his mid-80s, will be beyond spent. And while there may be a handful of ex-administration politicians aligned with them who could still have careers following a loss—think Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris—they will almost certainly do as much as they can to run away to run away from Biden’s unpopular, failed administration, leaving the president’s old inner circle on the outs.

This won’t be the end of everything, of course. Just as many of them did at the end of their tenures in the Obama (and even Clinton) administrations, Sullivan and co. will quickly find cushy jobs at the same D.C. think tanks and foundations they came from. Some of them may even find appointments in the next Democratic administration that rolls around. But Bidenism will no longer carry the day. If it fails, the party will repudiate it, for better or for worse. For the sake of our own sanity, let’s look at the “better” side first.

Contender #2: The Post-Bernie Progressive Left