The presidential age gap

On Nov. 5, Syracuse University sophomore Ella Brennan will go to the polls for the first time. She’s not happy with her options.  

Brennan, who is studying environment, sustainability and policy with a dual major in policy studies, will vote for a candidate decades older than she — a man born in the midst of World War II, an event so distant from Brennan that the textbooks teaching it aren’t even books anymore.

For the first time in American history, there will be a 60 year age gap between the youngest voters and the younger presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump. The gap stretches to 64 years between President Joe Biden and 18-year-old voters on Election Day. Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, are the oldest nominees from both their parties to ever run for president. Brennan, however, feels “old people” should not have the power to make decisions for her generation. 

“I don’t like that they have so much power and they’re not going to be here much longer,” she said. “You should not be able to be 80 years old and be president. There should be an [age] requirement.”

More than three quarters of Americans agree there should be a maximum age for someone to serve as president, according to a 2023 poll by The Economist and YouGov. The belief is highest among voters ages 18 to 29, with 81% of that population in favor of an age ceiling for president. Respondents, on average, picked 67 as the oldest a candidate should be. 

The age issue

The focus on the candidates’ ages, particularly Biden’s, has been incessant. In one weekend in February, the Guardian observed, the New York Times and Washington Post published a combined 21 stories about Trump threatening to leave NATO. The papers published 63 stories about Biden’s age. The disparity in coverage is exacerbated in right-wing media, said Howard Polskin, founder of TheRighting — a media platform that aggregates articles from right-wing sources and reports on the state of the conservative media world. 

“Right wing media has been making a huge case about Biden’s age for years—and not without justification. The difference is how negative it is. It’s astonishing the insults they throw at him,” Polskin said. “When it comes to Trump’s age, [there’s] legitimate questions as well. … The difference is that Trump projects much more strength than Joe Biden.”

Strength, Polskin said, is both mental and physical. He referenced the impact of Trump’s ability to speak confidently to an audience impromptu, as he often does after exiting a courthouse or at a rally, as well as Biden’s appearance. 

“[Biden] looks like a weaker, older man and often seems almost doddering,” Polskin said. “I’ve been saying this for the last six months: the United States is one Biden broken hip away from Trump being president. … That would really bring that issue to a head.”

Trump projects vitality, Polskin said. “I don’t expect him to break a hip.”

The focus on Biden’s age has been prevalent since at least 2018, when Trump nicknamed Biden “Sleepy Joe” to portray his opponent as an old man unfit to lead the country. The phrase was immediately picked up by right wing media, with over 2,000 mentions from Fox News alone in the 20 months after Biden declared his candidacy. Questions about Biden’s age have continued since then, but exploded in February with a Department of Justice report from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about Biden’s handling of classified documents. The report described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” with “diminished faculties in advancing age.” 

Media narratives, public perceptions

The media and the public feed off each other, with consequences in the campaign. While Biden and Trump are only four years apart, 71% of voters think Biden is too old to be president, while 39% of voters feel the same about Trump, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll. Given that the age difference between the candidates is actually small, the “age issue” may just be a distraction from other important issues in the race, worries SU political science professor Emily Thorson. She attributes this to a phenomenon called false equivalence, in which two situations are compared as similar even though they’re substantially different.

In political media, this can manifest as comparing Biden’s age to Trump’s offensive comments and run-ins with the law, Thorson said. She compared the focus on Biden’s age to the public’s ongoing obsession with Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016. Trump’s scandals were varied, pushing the media cycle forward and away from his last mistake, while Clinton’s emails stayed in the spotlight, she said.

“[Clinton’s emails] became really prominent in the public mind. My concern is that the same thing is happening now with Biden’s age,” Thorson said. “There’s like 40 different bad things [to say] about Trump, but when journalists cover something negative about Biden, it’s his age.”

Only 12% of Americans believe advanced age bestows “the experience and wisdom to do a good job” on elected officials, according to a 2023 Economist/YouGov poll. But age does have some benefits, insists Shana Gadarian, an SU political science professor. 

“Age comes with experience—job experience in politics, job experience outside of politics, civic skills, being connected to your neighborhood and social networks. Those things are all for the good,” Gadarian said. “When we see age being a problem for performance in any kind of job, it’s usually about cognitive decline rather than age itself.”

A 2022 study on whether Americans care how old their legislators are found voters do stereotype candidates based on age, but these perceptions don’t actually influence voters’ decisions. While young candidates may have more vigor then their older counterparts, they also far more likely to be described by voters as “inexperienced,” and less likely to be considered “well-qualified” to serve. Similarly, older candidates may be perceived as “less mentally sharp” and less representative of the public’s interest, but they’re more likely to be described as qualified for the position. Ultimately, researchers said, participants were just as likely to support older candidates as they were to support younger ones. 

The youth vote

Alec Sturm, a magazine, news and digital journalism major at SU, is planning to vote for Biden in 2024 with no qualms about his age. He’s happy with Biden’s climate change bill, the economy and the president’s efforts to keep abortion as accessible as possible in states where restrictions have been passed.

However, Sturm still wishes the candidates were younger, particularly for issues important to Gen Z. 

“Candidates should be younger, across the board for the presidency but also for local elections,” he said. “A president is making big, macro level decisions about their country, and a lot of its diplomacy with other countries. For those kinds of positions, you want people that have a lot of experience. But for someone who’s making decisions about the TikTok ban — something that a lot of college students are thinking about — and the internet and how it’s affecting us, you want people in power that are younger.

“Age matters to me because I want someone who I feel understands my perspective and my future as a young person,” Sturm added. “You don’t want someone ordering for the table who’s about to leave.” 

Polskin, the conservative media observer, wonders whether the candidates’ age in 2024 could skew an entire generation’s perceptions of the presidency. 

“I feel badly for voters your age,” Polskin said, recalling Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. “You don’t know what it feels like to have a young, vital, exciting presidential candidate running for the Oval Office that really galvanizes the American public. That’s a very exciting thing and it’s very positive for the country.

“Right now feels like we’re trapped in a rerun of a bad movie that no one wanted to see again.”