Rumors about Biden's age began long before he was elected in 2020.
When Biden, a former vice president, began reflecting on his run for the White House, critics noted that he would be 86 if he served two full terms.
“The question will not necessarily be whether he is fit to hold office in January 2021, but rather what toll the presidency takes on even the healthiest people,” Paul Kane, congressional correspondent for The Washington Post, told CNN already in 2017.
Biden, however, was no outlier in the 2020 race. One of his closest Democratic rivals, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, was even older: He was 78 at the time of the primary.
On the campaign trail, Sanders highlighted the “perks of being old,” even as he appealed to younger demographics.
“Having a long history gives people the understanding that these ideas I talk about are in my gut. They are in my heart,” he said at an Iowa town hall in 2019.
Many experts describe the American government as a “gerontocracy,” run by the elderly. In the United States, there are no limits on how old a public official can be, only limits on youth.
Currently, the average age of members of the Senate is 64 years old. That average is the same for Supreme Court justices, whose ages range between 76 and 52 years old.
But Miringoff noted that Biden's rise to the presidency in 2020 coincided with a period in which many of America's most prominent political figures were at the upper end of the age spectrum.
“It's been a strange period in which most of the political leaders on both sides have been elderly,” Miringoff said, pointing to figures like Sanders and 82-year-old Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Miringoff argued that this opened the door for critics to focus on age concerns. Additionally, he said, prejudices related to a person's age are considered socially acceptable, while prejudices about race or gender are not.
Studies show mixed perceptions when it comes to age and politics. A 2022 article published in the journal Political Behavior, for example, found that younger candidates were viewed as less qualified, less experienced, and less conservative.
It also found a “small but statistically significant penalty” in the approval ratings of older candidates.
However, the study found “little differences” in how age affected overall voter support.
“We were interested in whether people preferred an older or younger candidate, as well as whether older people liked older candidates and younger people liked younger candidates,” said one of the study's authors. , Jennifer Wolak, to the Niskanen Center, a think tank.
“And we discovered that it didn't matter at all,” he explained. “Young people did not prefer younger candidates. “Older people didn’t prefer older candidates.”
