Leaders of the Democratic Party are perfectly happy gambling on their own voters’ futures so long as it means they don’t have to have a difficult conversation with their 81-year-old standard-bearer. Recent polling suggests that — absent a criminal conviction — President Trump will return to the White House less than one year from now. Yet Democrats do not seem to care. 

Welcome to Washington. Any functional political party committed to its voters and its philosophy rather than one person would jettison a historically unpopular leader for the sake of keeping their policy priorities intact, regardless of who may lead it.  Yet the Democrats seem not to care about all that, no matter how pointedly their predicament is marked in the polls.

Just on Sunday, NBC News released polling that shows President Biden is in the weakest position for re-election of any incumbent in modern history. Mr. Trump leads his successor by five points — outside of the margin of error. Voters are saying that Mr. Biden is too old, too incoherent, and too weak to handle domestic security and wars in Europe and the Middle East. 

The staggering thing is that this is a problem with Mr. Biden. According to another NBC poll, though, Mr. Trump would lose to a “generic Democrat” by six points. That speaks not only to the country’s fatigue for the former president, but the sheer electoral malpractice Democrats are committing on behalf of a man who served in Washington alongside senators born in the 19th century.  

Republicans certainly have their own problems on this head. Mr. Trump may be the only Republican capable of losing to the incumbent, just as Mr. Biden may be the only Democrat capable of losing to the 45th president. The former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, beats Mr. Biden in a romp, if polling in mid-January is to be believed. 

When pressed on his obvious weaknesses, Democrats and Biden aides will tell reporters that the stock market is hitting record highs, we’re at full employment, inflation is abating, billions in student loans have been forgiven, and there are brighter days ahead. While all of those things may be true, the polling makes it clear that voters are unlikely to reward Mr. Biden for it. 

For young voters — whom Mr. Biden cannot afford to lose — the president’s accomplishments have done little. According to the Federal Reserve, just 1.4 percent of the stock market is owned by those age 35 and younger, meaning its record highs don’t bring in meaningful gains for anyone of my age cohort. Housing, food, and gas costs have skyrocketed under this president, leading 93 percent of young people to rate the economy as “poor” or “only fair,” according to a New York Times poll. 

And Mr. Trump may now be benefiting from that dour assessment from members of my generation. According to NBC News’ Sunday presidential poll, Messrs. Trump and Biden are tied among voters aged 18 to 34, with both men winning 42 percent.

Even MSNBC ran a segment on Mr. Biden’s dismal prospects with young voters, especially young Black men. “A lot of my friends are obviously my age, so we’re a little younger,” one of those young men, Kinard Givens, told the cable news channel. “We’ve only voted once, you know, for president, and Trump is kinda all we know. They’re like, ‘Well, we’re broke with Biden. We weren’t with Trump.’ And that’s kind of the only thing that I’m hearing over, and over again.”

The only issues where Mr. Biden is trusted more than his predecessor — according to polling — are abortion, protecting democracy, and voters’ belief that the incumbent cares more about them than the 45th president did. If Democrats were serious about not only solidifying their base but electrifying independent voters, they actually have a wide array of candidates who could do so if only Mr. Biden were to step aside. 

Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, beats Mr. Trump in her home state in a presidential election. She coasted to a double-digit victory on the abortion issue in 2022, and remains broadly popular in the state. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has been an anti-Trump stalwart and household name among Democrats. The Coast governor may be one of the party’s most gifted messengers.

Senator Warnock, who will soon have more experience in the Senate than President Obama did when he walked into the Oval Office, certainly wouldn’t confuse France’s president Emmanuel Macron with his long-deceased predecessor, Francois Mitterand, as Mr. Biden did on Monday.  

With a bench as deep and experienced as the Democrats have right now, and especially considering the incumbent’s historically low polling numbers, one would expect leading Democrats to push for a new generation of leadership. Because they fail to do so, though, those same Democrats make it all the more likely that Mr. Trump will stand across from Chief Justice Roberts next January and take the oath again.