If Democrats are smart, they will listen to Ryan. His district includes hurting industrial areas such as Youngstown and Akron — so he understands how to win the very voters Democrats lost in 2016 and need to win back. Do they have a better chance of winning back those voters by electing him or an aging, coastal San Francisco liberal such as Pelosi? Ryan is young and dynamic — just 43 years old. The House Democratic leadership, by contrast, is old. The Post recently reported that the average age of the House Democratic leadership is almost 65 years old. And Pelosi is 76 — a year older than Bernie Sanders. Perhaps Democrats should take the advice of John F. Kennedy and pass the torch to a new generation.

The long-term problem for Democrats is that much of that new generation has been wiped out at the polls. We saw the impact of the Democratic collapse in the states during this year’s presidential primaries. The Republican field was brimming with candidates, while on the Democratic side Clinton struggled to defeat a disheveled 75-year-old socialist from Vermont, and the rest of the field — Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee — could not crack the low single digits.

Eight years of losing statehouses and governors’ mansions have left Democrats with no bench. They are like an NFL team with aging stars who are long past their prime and few prospects in the pipeline.

Democrats may believe that the way back from the periphery is to follow the advice Aaron Burr offers Hamilton: “Talk less. Smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against and what you’re for.” That didn’t work out so well for Clinton. If Democrats can’t find new leaders who can connect with the working-class voters they lost to Donald Trump, they may find themselves even more isolated from the American heartland than they are today.