We Need to Talk About Charisma

The next Democratic presidential candidate better have it, because the last few haven't.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

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As Joe Biden’s presidency staggers to an end, it’s remarkable to think that once upon a time, Biden was thought of as a highly appealing politician, someone who could spellbind audiences with his passionate rhetoric and connect to voters one-on-one with his extraordinary empathy. But by 2020, he was no longer that politician. Instead, Democratic primary voters thought, he was the safe choice to dislodge Donald Trump — a reassuring, avuncular white guy whose promise to remove the drama from national politics could attract voters in the middle. At the time, that choice — which was about as calculated and strategic as a collective decision by millions of people could be — was the smart one. After all, he won.

But even as he brought to bear the governing skills he had developed over 35 years in the Senate and 8 as vice president to achieve both legislative success and an enormous body of salutary policy change, something was missing. That something was charisma, which Biden had long ceased to possess. Whatever else Democrats do from this point forward — and they have a lot to do — they absolutely must start taking it seriously. It’s not frivolous or a distraction from the real work of policy; it’s what makes it possible to win elections.

You know it when you see it

Scholars have been considering the functions of charisma in politics since Max Weber began theorizing about it a century ago, but it’s difficult to define, and comes in a variety of forms. Barack Obama, for instance, had a distant brand of charisma; he could pull people in from the back of an arena, bringing listeners to something almost religious, a collective rapture that bound them to him and to each other. Others like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had a more intimate kind; they could give a good speech, but they were at their best when we watched them forging connections with people in small groups or one at a time.

Even in our mediated age, it’s possible for politicians to have neither the intimate nor the at-a-distance charisma and still succeed, even getting as far as winning their party’s presidential nomination. But those politicians often fail when running for president. Look at what happened to Ron DeSantis, who inspired a tremendous degree of excitement from Republicans until it became clear that he is profoundly awkward in public; nobody watched him on the stump in Iowa last year and walked away saying “I will devote the next year of my life to helping this guy.”

And that’s what political charisma looks like in practice: that undefinable thing that makes people swoon. Do you remember when Obama gave his speech at the 2004 convention? A little over 15 minutes, and when it was over, pretty much everyone who had seen it said “Holy crap, that guy is going to be president one day.”

That’s not always how it works, of course. Here’s another way to think of it: One definition of charisma in actors is that whatever is going on in a scene, they’re the one you can’t take your eyes off of. There are politicians who have that too. Like Donald Trump.

It’s hard to define precisely what Trump’s charisma consists of. He’s not a good orator. He doesn’t have the kind of personal charm that makes everyone around him feel special, like Clinton could. But he is undeniably compelling. And in his three elections, he beat two charisma-challenged candidates and lost in a one-of-a-kind campaign in which neither candidate could really do much campaigning.

And Kamala Harris? She is an accomplished politician who reached her charisma ceiling when she became the Democratic nominee. For many years, my position on Harris’s future presidential prospects was that in order to overcome the tidal wave of sexism and racism she would inevitably face in a presidential campaign, she would have to be an A+ political talent. But she just wasn’t — she was more like a B+ talent, at best. And though she got better during the 2024 campaign, it wasn’t enough.

For Democrats who care about policy and governing, worrying too much about charisma seems like surrender to the triviality of modern politics, and maybe it is. But think about the elections in your lifetime. Some of them may have involved two candidates who were about equally charismatic; say, the 1988 contest between the patrician dweeb George H.W. Bush and the dreary technocrat Michael Dukakis. But in the ones where one candidate was clearly more charismatic than the other, did the less charismatic one ever win?

No, they did not. Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, Ronald Reagan — each of them dispatched two opponents who failed at one of the main requirements of contemporary presidential politics, holding the public’s attention and drawing people toward them.

Not sufficient, but absolutely necessary

This is not to say that charisma is the only thing that matters in presidential campaigns — far from it. There are a hundred different variables that make a difference. But this may be the one where there’s the greatest disconnect between its importance and the amount of consideration we give it.

Before a charismatic individual emerges, Democrats convince themselves that what they need is a particular type of candidate. They’re doing it right now. We need someone with working-class credibility! We need someone who isn’t from the coasts! We need an outsider! All of it sounds plausible, but it’s wrong.

Democrats often rally around a candidate because they think they’re the right type, and not only does it often fail, by the next election everything looks different. An example: In 2004, with America engaged in two wars they told themselves they needed someone with national security credibility. They nominated a Vietnam war hero, thinking that a couple of draft-dodgers like George Bush and Dick Cheney couldn’t possibly impugn his patriotism. I was at a conference of liberals that fall when Jim Hightower told the audience, “I don’t care if John Kerry is a sack of cement, we’re going to drag him across the finish line!” We saw how that turned out.

After that election, many Democrats still thought they needed someone hawkish and centrist. Absolutely no one said, “What we need is a black man from Chicago with the middle name Hussein.” To say that would have been absurd. But the black man with the middle name Hussein turned out to be Obama.

Republicans struggled for years to deal with Obama’s charisma; at times, they even called attention to it in an attempt to diffuse it. Here’s an ad produced by Karl Rove’s super PAC in the 2012 campaign:

When you watch that, you wind up saying “Wow, he is one seriously cool dude. I think I’ll vote for him.” Which was not what Rove intended.

So no, what Democrats need in the next election isn’t someone with working-class credibility. What they need is a politician with enough charisma that what type of person they are doesn’t matter. Not someone who looks good on paper, but someone who can be a compelling main character of our political drama.

Which brings us back to Joe Biden. For essentially the entirety of his presidency, there was a communication vacuum around the White House. The most important character in the American political drama was incapable of offering a convincing case for what his administration was doing and against his opponents. How many times did you watch a Biden speech or interview, sitting on the edge of your seat saying “Please don’t screw up, please don’t screw up”? The best-case scenario was that when it was over, you sighed with relief and said “OK, that could have been worse!”

My point is not to rehash all the arguments over Biden’s age, just to highlight what was missing: an engaging, charismatic communicator who could seize attention, persuade voters, and put Republicans on the defensive. It should never happen again. Whatever else you might demand of Democratic presidential candidates in terms of experience, ideology, and policy proposals, charisma should be the sine qua non of every primary voter’s vote.

Obviously, you can’t just wish that candidate into being. And it can be hard to tell, before they actually step into the forge of a presidential campaign, whether any individual really has what it takes; we’ve seen many a candidate get smaller when they ran for president. I can’t say with confidence which of the Democrats who are thinking of running next time have the requisite charisma, even if I have my impressions. But at the very least, it should be something every Democrat is thinking about as the positioning for 2028 gets underway.