Turn the page?

Suddenly, another generation gets an opening.

Who knows if it will work out for them, but Democrats moved ahead in the race to provide voters with what many demanded: any candidate not named Biden or Trump.

My NPR colleagues have reported extensively on “double haters,” voters who found their choices unbearable. My colleague Tamara Keith reported earlier this year on voters who simply did not believe that Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee, regardless of his lack of serious opposition. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was polling at close to ten percent as an independent, despite a variety of vulnerabilities.

By reacting at last, Biden and the Democrats avoid a repeat of 2016, when the nomination of two unpopular candidates turned the election into a coin toss that Trump won.

For many voters, the battles of the past eight years have been exhausting. A different lineup creates the possibility of something new (though if Harris is nominated, Republicans will do all they can to link her to everything voters haven’t liked about the past four years).

Biden backed out over concerns about his age; but his withdrawal creates the possibility that age will be a factor in entirely new ways. It raises the notion, at least, of a new generation of political leadership.

Just as the World War Two generation held the presidency from 1952 to 1992 (every president in that period except Reagan had served in the war) the Boomers, born from 1946-64, have largely held the presidency since 1992. (Obama seemed like a Generation X president but was born in 1961.) Trump,  born in 1946, is among the oldest Boomers; Biden is older than that.

Maybe it’s unsurprising that so much of our politics these last three decades has entailed fighting the battles of the 1960’s over and over and over again.

We can see in the developments of the past few days an effort to accommodate voters’ desire for something new. Trump chose as his running mate Senator J.D. Vance, 39. Trump himself, in accepting the presidential nomination, briefly spoke of moving beyond the past—saying it would be no good to lead only half the country—before returning to his standard campaign riffs that appeal to something less than half the country.

Then Biden withdrew, endorsing his vice president who is a generation younger. Harris is borderline Gen X, having been born in late 1964. If she is nominated, plausible running mates include Andy Beshear of Kentucky, age 46. Other contenders are in their 50’s, people for whom the 1980’s, not the 60’s, were formative years.

Nobody’s age will matter if they seem out of step or out of touch. But any candidate who can speak credibly of the future will be playing notes that voters have not heard in years.