Democrats need more alternatives, and not just in the presidential race.
A half-decade's worth of losses has left the party decimated at lower levels of office. Under President Obama, the Democratic Party has not only lost control of Congress, but much of the farm team that might be able to win upcoming elections.
"Democrats have underperformed at every level, up and down the ballot, during these two presidential terms," says Robert Dion, a political scientist at the University of Evansville in Indiana.
Democrats now lack a single statewide officeholder in no fewer than 20 states. Most of those are in the South, but in addition to such deeply red states as Texas and Alabama, Democrats are completely shut out of top state offices in places where the party has won the presidential vote in recent cycles, including Michigan, Florida and Ohio.
"The biggest loss of 2010 for Democrats was not the congressional bloodbath, it was the state legislative bloodbath," says Mo Elleithee, a former spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.
The party's huge losses in 2010 were made worse last year. Following last year's GOP sweep, Republicans now control the main political branches -- the governorship and the legislature -- in 23 states. By contrast, Democrats hold total sway in just seven.
That's the party's lowest number since before the Civil War, when there were 15 fewer states.
All told, Democrats hold the fewest number of political offices at the state and federal levels, below the presidency, than at any time since the 1920s.
Instead of being able to build up the junior varsity, the party is dominated by a gerontocracy. Hillary Clinton, still the Democratic frontrunner, will be 69 on Election Day next year. Her main, real and potential, rivals, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden, are already in their 70s.
The story's the same on Capitol Hill. The most likely incoming House GOP leaders, Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, both turned 50 this year. By contrast, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is 75, as is her Senate counterpart Harry Reid.
Democrats may have an advantage when it comes to the youth vote, but they lack younger politicians. All but a handful of the remaining 18 Democratic governors are over 55.
Many of today's prominent Republicans, including Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, are still in their 40s. Jeb Bush is the only career politician in the Republican presidential field, in fact, who assumed a top office prior to 2010.
Members of Generation X, which came of age during Ronald Reagan's presidency, are among the most conservative age groups in the electorate. As baby boomers finally recede from the national stage, Democrats lack the Gen X candidates to replace them.
Democrats do dominate big city politics. Democrats are mayors in 21 of the nation's 25 largest cities. But the concentration of Democratic talent in metropolitan areas, which includes most of their remaining House members, generally means their best-known politicians are too liberal to have much of a chance statewide.
For next year's must-win Senate races in Ohio and Wisconsin, Democrats again are turning to old hands such as former Gov. Ted Strickland (age 74) and former Sen. Russ Feingold (a spry 62).
There are exceptions, as Elleithee points out. For instance, Kamala Harris, the 50-year-old state attorney general in California, looks well-positioned to hold the Senate seat being vacated next year by Barbara Boxer.
But there aren't a lot of Californias (where even Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown is 77). In Indiana, Republican Gov. Mike Pence appears vulnerable for reelection next year, but "Democrats just have not been able to put together a young bench," says Ed Feigenbaum, editor of Indiana Legislative Insight. "Every candidate being fielded is a white guy in his 60s."
In the South, Democrats have such a hard time recruiting credible candidates that amateurs who do no active campaigning at all can come away with nominations to high office.
Robert Gray is the latest case in point. In August, the truck driver won the Democratic nomination for governor in Mississippi despite running such a low-key campaign that he hadn't even told his mother he was a candidate. And he lives with his mother.
"This is a symptom of a larger problem with Democrats in the South," says Brent Leatherwood, executive director of the Republican Party in Tennessee, where Democrats have nominated amateurs in recent races for governor and senator. "They can't find legitimate candidates to run."
Maybe much of the South is a lost cause for Democrats at this point. But even in states Obama carried twice, such as Colorado and Nevada, the party's bench has been all but emptied out, with promising representatives and state officials having been booted from office.
Democrats know they need to deepen their talent pool. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee has announced a $70 million effort to win back state legislatures.
The DLCC and other Democrats know that they have to get more bodies in place over the next three election cycles -- 2016, 2018 and 2020 -- in order to avoid handing Republicans the same kind of advantage in the redistricting process that has helped the GOP solidify its hold on power in Congress and the states since 2010.
"If after 2020 they have not changed the battlefield and not realigned some of these districts, I think they are heading into a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end, at all," says Elleithee, who now directs the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown University."That's how important the next three cycles are for the Democratic Party."
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