The Democrats find themselves with a 2024 conundrum. Joe Biden, the party’s standard-bearer, is widely disliked. A new poll found that a 64% of Democrats would want a candidate other than Biden to seek the nomination in two years. Rapid inflation has eaten away at the 79-year-old president’s popularity and he is viewed as increasingly out of touch, a vestige of another era that many voters want to leave behind.

At the same time, Biden will easily win a Democratic primary if he runs again. Sitting presidents are rarely forced aside. The top candidates in a hypothetical primary don’t want to take him on – almost all of them ruled out the idea of waging a direct challenge. This is understandable, since no single governor or senator has the ability to defeat Biden, one-on-one. Democrats look warily to examples like Ted Kennedy, who ran a primary against President Jimmy Carter and was soundly beaten. Carter went on to lose the general election, in 1980, to Ronald Reagan.

What should be done? In an ideal world, Biden would recognize that he’ll turn 82 shortly after election day in 2024. There are plenty of Americans who are vigorous at that age, but none of them are governing large states or nations. Biden could fully deliver on the promise of his 2020 campaign that he would defeat Donald Trump and be a bridge to the next generation of Democrats. In not seeking another term, he could declare victory on a host of matters, like overseeing much-needed infrastructure funding and finally ending the war in Afghanistan. There are plenty of American presidents who have done less than Biden in one term.

If Biden decides against another term, there will be a healthy open primary for the nomination. One problem for the Democrats is that the obvious frontrunner will be Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris. Though his poll numbers are slipping, Biden can still make the credible case that he can defeat Donald Trump a second time if Trump chooses to run again. Harris’s polling numbers are as frail as Biden’s, and she ran a very poor campaign for the presidency in 2019. Harris is simultaneously well-positioned to defeat any Democrat who takes her on, and is poorly suited for a general election, where she’d carry all the baggage of the Biden years without being able to summon the memory of Barack Obama, who Biden served with for eight years. A Kamala Harris 2024 campaign, for Democrats, could end up the worst of all worlds.

Ideally – and this would not happen, because Harris is ambitious – Democrats would find a way to hold an open primary without any of the candidates tied directly to the Biden administration. Beyond Biden, there are a growing number of Democrats across America who could be viable in a general election against Trump or Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, the most politically potent Republican hovering around 2024 right now. If they win re-election, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock and Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could be top contenders, having won multiple times on forbidding swing turf. Warnock would be particularly strong as a charismatic Black candidate – he was a prominent pastor – with the potential to recreate Obama’s multiracial coalition. Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, assuming he survives his 2022 re-election campaign, is another purple-state Democrat who would be an intriguing national candidate, having made a name for himself by defying liberals on unpopular Covid restrictions.

Part of Harris’s weakness is that, as a California senator, she was never battle-tested in a state where Democrats don’t dominate. Both JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, and Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, have the Harris problem: they run states where Republicans are increasingly impotent. As executives, they can argue, unlike legislators, they have to make tough decisions each day that affect millions of people. Pritzker is attempting to be a national leader on gun control and Newsom is taking on DeSantis directly, running ads in Florida promoting California as a place that won’t infringe on abortion rights and meddle in the classroom.

Progressives don’t have the equivalent of a Bernie Sanders, who is not going to run again. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is unlikely to run in 2024, when she will just turn 35, the age to be legally president. Like Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, a former Sanders campaign co-chair, is in the House, which is a historically tough place to mount a successful presidential bid. Both, though, could be strong future candidates, particularly if they win Senate seats.

For now, Biden is emboldened. No prominent Democrat will cross him and he will feel especially motivated if Trump is back on the campaign trail. Biden and Trump crave a rematch, even though each political party would be better off if both men moved on.

• Ross Barkan is a New York-based journalist