Opinion | Up-and-coming Democrats to watch

On Apr 18, 2022

Who should Republicans fear on the opposing team? If you’re in the top tier of likely GOP nominees for president in 2024, who are your political consultants studying?

Republicans like to tell themselves that the Democrats are spent, that the party’s leadership is past its prime and its next generation is years from being ready to lead. Certainly, it is true that President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are setting records for age-related metrics, and that both sometimes appear frail and beset by the issues that even sharp seniors have to deal with. At 71, Sen. Charles E. Schumer isn’t going to be a defining figure for a new generation of Democrats, either.

But is it true the cupboard is bare?

The Post’s Aaron Blake posted a “top 10” list of potential Democratic nominees. A list of likely Republicans would have former president Donald Trump in the top slot, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida, as well as Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, would round out the list.

No one in Blake’s political hot-stove league is of much concern to center-right activists. The failures of 15 months of unified Democratic rule in D.C. are so many and so palpable — gas and grocery prices are the GOP’s best friends now — that the usual suspects on Blake’s list elicit more guffaws than furrowed brows.

Who ought to worry them? Three rising Democratic stars — not yet on most political radar screens but soon will be — strike me as formidable.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro and California Rep. Ro Khanna are all a deft move, some luck, and a bold announcement away from positions of lasting influence. All have shown themselves smart and nimble.

All radiate good will. Khanna is the Yale Law graduate whose new book “Dignity in a Digital Age” tackles many of the issues swirling around the titans of tech concentrated in his Silicon Valley district. You will see Khanna showing up on Fox News and conservative talk radio; in my long chat with him last week, Khanna takes all questions and answers them directly, including one that elicited a condemnation of a San Diego high school slashing honors courses in the name of “equity,” and another wherein he calls for more police funding. His tacking away from the left’s rockiest shoals is deft.

Polis parlayed his time at Princeton into entrepreneurial success and wealth, did some years in the U.S. House and has successfully governed Colorado from a center-left disposition, displaying an all-too-rare (for Democrats) common-sense approach to covid-19. He’s popular in an age of unpopular incumbents. Mark that down.

Mark down as well — and underline — Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and favorite to be its next governor. A triumph in the fall instantly puts Shapiro as the most likely Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024, but his two terms as a tough-on-crime state attorney general make him eligible to go for the brass ring within a year of a November win.

A center-left Democrat and a strong supporter of Israel, Shapiro worries me more than any other Democrat. He’s worked diligently at staying in the mainstream of American politics in a key swing state. Some of my Catholic friends in Pennsylvania think Shapiro was too hard on the church as he scoured dioceses for child-abusing priests. But Shapiro did his job as attorney general: He enforced the law. Very few Democrats have any credibility on crime these days; Shapiro does.

Imagine if you will — immortal words from Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone — an electorate willing to jump a generation to escape the endless bitterness that has marked our politics since the mid-1990s.

Imagine that Youngkin and Shapiro seek and receive their parties’ nominations and then select inspiring running mates such as Scott and Khanna (who, by then, might be appointed senator to replace Dianne Feinstein in the Senate).

An unlikely, but not impossible, cracking of the ice that has frozen over American politics would follow. Such a thaw would be welcome by the vast middle of America.