The debate has US voters asking, how old is too old to be president? But it’s a bigger problem than Biden and Trump

How old is too old to be president?

As Americans gear up to vote in this year’s presidential election, it’s a question that’s been on a lot of people’s minds.

Especially as the two oldest candidates to ever run for office in the US are running again — breaking the record for the oldest two people to ever compete for the presidency that they set four years ago.

Opinion polling has routinely found that voters don’t like this, with more people worried about Joe Biden’s age than Donald Trump’s.

A February Ipsos poll found 59 per cent of voters thought both candidates were too old.

A New York Times/Siena poll found nearly half of voters thought Biden was too old to handle the job of president. If successful, Biden would be 82 years old at the start of his second term, four years older than Trump, who would be 78.

These concerns were amplified in the wake of Friday’s presidential debate, during which Biden appeared frail, spoke quietly and seemed to lose his train of thought.

But here’s the thing: Biden and Trump are not the only older politicians in Washington DC.

In fact, the average age in the US Congress has been climbing for decades and the current Congress is one of the oldest in history.

In the early 1980s, the median age of Congress was under 50, but it has been climbing steadily since then to just under 60 today.

Politicians are even older in the Senate, where politicians serve longer terms.

Around one in five members of Congress are aged 70 or over, but if you look at just the Senate, that rises to about a third of members.

The vicious cycle of alienation

Virtually all parliaments around the world are older than the population they represent. You’d expect that: we want people with life and work experience to be making important decisions, and older people tend to have more of that.

But the flip side is that many life experiences end up under-represented.

For instance, you end up with senior citizens interrogating Silicon Valley moguls about technology platforms that they clearly don’t use.

“In general, representative democracy should try to represent their population,” says Associate Professor Daniel Bessner from the University of Washington.

Joe Vogel is a delegate in Maryland’s state parliament, the House of Delegates, and says America has changed dramatically since many lawmakers were young.

“We were having these conversations about what mass shooting drills are like in our schools,” he says. 

“I grew up in a generation where you would sit in a classroom and think of where your hiding spot was or whether you’d have time to run out the door. That is a perspective on these issues that a lot of my colleagues just don’t have.

“Many of my colleagues had never lived at a time, had never gone to school at a time when those mass shootings were as common as they are now.”‘

Professor Daniel Stockemer from the University of Ottawa says a lack of youth representation makes a difference in how parliaments work and what is on the agenda.