Rumblings about Biden’s age began well before he was elected in 2020.
When Biden, a former vice president, started to mull his candidacy for the White House, critics pointed out that he would be 86 years old if he completed two full terms in office.
“The issue won’t necessarily be whether he’s fit to serve come January 2021, but what toll the presidency takes on even the healthiest of people,” Paul Kane, The Washington Post’s congressional correspondent, told CNN as far back as 2017.
Biden, however, was hardly an outlier in the 2020 race. One of his closest Democratic rivals, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, was even older: He was 78 at the time of the primaries.
On the campaign trail, Sanders played up the “advantages to being old”, even as he appealed to younger demographics.
“Having a long record gives people the understanding that these ideas that I am talking about, they are in my guts. They are in my heart,” he told an Iowa town hall in 2019.
Many experts describe the US government as a “gerontocracy”, led by elders. In the US, there are no upper limits to how old a public office-holder can be, only limits to how young.
Currently, the average age of Senate members is 64. That average is the same for Supreme Court justices, who range in age from 76 to 52.
But Miringoff noted that Biden’s ascent to the presidency in 2020 coincided with a period where many of the foremost political figures in the US were on the upper end of the age spectrum.
“It’s been an odd period in that most of the political leaders on both sides have been elderly,” Miringoff said, pointing to figures like Sanders and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, 82.
Miringoff argued that this opened the door for critics to concentrate on concerns about age. Furthermore, he said, bias related to someone’s age is considered socially acceptable in a way that biases about race or gender are not.
Studies show mixed perceptions when it comes to age and politics. A 2022 paper in the journal Political Behavior, for instance, found that younger candidates were seen as less qualified, less experienced and less conservative.
It also found a “small but statistically significant penalty” in the approval ratings for older candidates.
Nevertheless, the study found “few differences” in how age affected overall voter support.
“We were interested to see whether people preferred an older or younger candidate as well as whether older people liked older candidates and younger people liked younger candidates,” one of the study’s authors, Jennifer Wolak, told the Niskanen Center, a think tank.
“And we found it didn’t matter at all,” she explained. “Young people did not prefer younger candidates. Old people did not prefer older candidates.”