Here’s another way to look at why Republicans swept the 2024 elections: It’s the fault, only partly, of course, of the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party. Going back through history, it’s hard to find a time when a party’s leadership was so far along in years. The founder presidents retired in their mid-sixties. Andrew Jackson retired at 69, Abraham Lincoln was murdered at 56, and Ulysses S. Grant retired at 54. Theodore Roosevelt died at age 60, Franklin Roosevelt at 63.

Quite a contrast with President Joe Biden, older when he was inaugurated than Ronald Reagan was on his last Air Force One flight home to California. Biden, born in 1942, was installed as the Democratic nominee in 2020 by then-House Majority Whip James Clyburn (1940), and was pushed out of the 2024 nomination by the still very active former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (1940).

So far as has been reported, neither Clyburn nor Pelosi tried back in 2022 or 2023 to persuade Biden not to run for reelection, though both must have had some awareness that aging was diminishing his powers. It’s not an easy thing to do: A century ago, Chief Justice William Howard Taft said his hardest duty was to tell the 80-year-old Justice Joseph McKenna he must retire.

Also not stepping in were the similarly aged near-majority of senators from the 19 states counted as safe Democratic in this election: Richard Blumenthal (1946), Ben Cardin (1943), Tom Carper (1947), Richard Durbin (1944), Mazie Hirono (1947), Angus King (1944), Edward Markey (1946), Patty Murray (1950), Jack Reed (1949), Bernie Sanders (1941), Charles Schumer (1950), Jeanne Shaheen (1947), Elizabeth Warren (1949), Peter Welch (1947) and Ron Wyden (1949). (Cardin and Carper did not seek reelection this year.)

All seem to be in fine physical and mental condition, so far as I know, but each must be aware of the decline of many of their contemporaries. As one of the latter (born in 1944), I’m aware of how many of them, as well as Biden, have political roots in the years dominated by Vietnam and Watergate.

From Vietnam, they took the lesson that America must extract itself from seemingly unwinnable military commitments. You can see that impulse in Biden, who opposed military aid to the flailing South Vietnamese in 1975 and who pressed for what appears to have been an overhasty withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

It’s also visible in the records of these and many other Democrats who opposed, with equal vehemence, the Gulf War resolution in 1991 and the Iraq War resolution in 2002, though the former is now regarded as uncontroversial.

From Watergate, they retained the idea of driving a Republican president out of office for his misdeeds. The failure of the pursuit of Reagan over Iran-Contra in 1987-88 did not prevent them from pursuing against President-elect Donald Trump the Russia collusion hoax first hatched by the unsuccessful campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (1947).