After 16 days of bitter wrangling during the steamy summer of 1924, the exhausted Democrats — deeply divided over Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan — nominated little-known former congressman and ambassador John W. Davis for president on the 103rd ballot.

In November, Davis got wiped out by Calvin Coolidge by almost a 2-to-1 margin in the popular vote.

After 22 days of bitter wrangling this month, the exhausted House Republicans — deeply divided over the idea of compromise on Capitol Hill — selected little-known Rep. Mike Johnson as speaker after three other GOP candidates had flamed out.

Johnson may prove to be the John W. Davis of the 21st century, an obscure placeholder who could not avert a stinging defeat for his party in the upcoming election. But there’s no way to know for sure a year in advance.

In theory, Johnson’s surprise elevation should trigger a fascinating 2024 political science experiment testing what matters in congressional elections in these polarized times.

Ever since it took 15 ballots to initially anoint Kevin McCarthy as speaker, the House Republicans have gone out of their way to prove that they are the Gang That Couldn’t Govern. A kindergarten class at recess has displayed more organizational cohesion than the House Republicans.

But will that be a voting issue a year from now?

If accountability still mattered in politics, the 2024 House elections would be a referendum on the GOP majority and the resulting multi-headed speakership.

But the safer bet would be to gamble that legal maneuvering in federal and state courts on redistricting and the pyrotechnics of the presidential race will outweigh everything else on the House side. And no one has ever gone wrong in analyzing American politics by also stressing the economy.

These days, campaign strategy is often downgraded as a factor in congressional elections. But the big test for the Democrats in trying to win back the House is whether they stress Republican ideology or GOP incompetence.

You can just picture Democratic consultants savoring every time a new detail emerges about Johnson’s long history of inflammatory statements on social issues. In 2004, for example, Johnson wrote a newspaper op-ed stating, “Homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

In similar fashion, Democrats can easily conclude that Johnson’s fervent advocacy of overturning the last election will boomerang in those 18 Republican-controlled House districts that Joe Biden carried in 2020. In fact, Democrats seem poised to argue that Johnson might well try to intervene as speaker if 2024 is also a squeaker election.

But the Democrats run a major risk in going out of their way to demonize Johnson. It is daunting to turn a political figure with low name identification into a symbol of menace. With his low-key manner and backbench record, Johnson is not suddenly going to dominate the news over the next year, no matter what the House Republicans do.

For more than a decade, Republican consultants tried to make every House election a referendum on Nancy Pelosi. Even though Pelosi was about the best-known figure on Capitol Hill, the strategy kept backfiring because voters in swing districts had more immediate concerns than deciding the future of the San Francisco Democrat.

What does seem to be resonating with voters today is that the Republicans’ misfiring House majority is not normal.

A YouGov poll last week found that 57 percent of Americans thought that the lack of a speaker was “hurting the government’s ability to function.” Only 4 percent of Americans thought that there was a positive value to the protracted fight over the House leadership.

Equally telling is that even a plurality of Republicans in the same YouGov poll admit that the Democrats are the more united political party. Independents, whose allegiance is the best benchmark to follow as 2024 grows closer, rated Democrats as more united than Republicans by a 4-to-1 margin.

What we may be witnessing is new evidence that perceptions of competence matter more in politics than standard ideological attacks.

Jimmy Carter’s political problems as president were based more on the electorate’s sense that he had lost control than he had veered too far from the mainstream. The same syndrome afflicted George W. Bush after the debacle that surrounded Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The problem facing Johnson is that almost every week from here to the election offers a new opportunity to show that the House Republicans are the party of never-ending chaos theory.

Even if Johnson and the Republicans agree to approve a new continuing resolution to keep the government operating after Nov. 17, then what?

At some point, patchwork politics begins to rip again. Given the never-compromise fanaticism of a significant chunk of the House Republican caucus, a government shutdown at some point in 2024 seems highly likely.

In normal times, Republican lose politically from every protracted halt in government funding. And this time around, the House GOP majority is already suspect with the voters going into the inevitable budget battle.

Equally inevitable is a confrontation with the Biden administration and responsible Senate Republicans like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell over funding for the war in Ukraine.

A protracted cutoff in aid to Kyiv will not make the House Republicans look frugal. Rather, it will make them seem like the bumbling enablers of Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

In short, Mike Johnson’s social conservative orientation matters far less than the abiding truth about his Republican majority.

Of course, the inept House Republicans aren’t ready for prime time. But what is truly alarming is that they don’t seem even ready for an elementary school Thanksgiving pageant.

Walter Shapiro is a veteran of Politics Daily, USA Today, Time, Newsweek and the Washington Post. He is a lecturer in political science at Yale and a fellow at the Brennan Center (NYU).