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If 2016 was the most important election of our lives, 2024 is shaping up to be the most daunting. It looks like we’re headed for a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that almost no one, except the candidates, wants.
In an April NBC poll, nearly two-thirds of voters said they didn’t think Trump should run for president again, and more than two-thirds said the same about Biden, largely because they think he’s too old. How did a once great nation end up facing an election between two very old and very unpopular white people?
I can outline the proximate causes. On the Republican side, just like in 2016, a massive primary field is splitting the moderate vote, giving Trump plenty of room to consolidate his ultra-MAGA minority. Democrats, for their part, have no good options as long as the vice presidency is occupied by the hapless Kamala D. Harris, whose impolitic shocks, inability to retain staff and a tendency to choke under pressure make her an even less attractive candidate than her boss. Every Democratic operative I’ve asked balked at the idea of running it, and also agreed that, for coalition management reasons, it can’t be left out.
However, this only describes the problem; it doesn’t explain why we seem stuck with two candidates we generally didn’t like, one already in his 80s and the other turning 78 before Election Day 2024. Nor does it explain America’s broader problem of political gerontocracy , as embodied by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who seems too cognitively impaired to fully perform her duties or to realize that she should retire.
Three explanations, from the most benign to the most worrying.
keep going this authorMegan McArdleopinions of
First, there is the fact that American politics rewards name recognition. Other countries may choose their members of parliament from a party list selected for competence, stamina and various types of diversity, including age. But Americans vote for candidates directly, and because we don’t always do our electoral homework diligently, we often end up simply settling on the candidates we know best.
Who do we know more about? Celebrities and people who already do the work.
In this story, we didn’t vote for two old white men; we voted on the most famous candidate in each primary, the former vice president and the reality TV star. This isn’t great, obviously; it would be nice if well-informed voters made thoughtful decisions. But it is certainly quite democratic. And, as a side effect, our candidates are slightly more likely to be old because the longer people live, the more time they have to acquire fame.
The reason to be skeptical of this story is that the longer a person lives, the longer that person has to lose fame, at least among young voters. Which brings us neatly to the second possible factor: the electorate is getting older and people like to vote for people who remind them of themselves. To be sure, I can’t prove that older voters identify with Biden and Trump. However, I can confidently predict that shortly after writing this column, my inbox will be filled with letters from people in their seventies and eighties angrily pointing out that old does not mean incompetent.
(I pause here to agree: Age increases the risk of cognitive decline and other diseases, but many people Biden’s age remain sharp and vigorous.)
However, this cannot be the whole explanation either. Not more 16.8% of the population is over 65 years oldso most of the voters who brought us the old duels were young or middle-aged.
Here’s a third explanation: The two old white candidates actually have two important political skills, not despite their age but because of it.
Trump and Biden are both relics of a time when America was more stratified by race and gender, but less polarized by income, education, ideology or party. And they act like that. For all Trump’s verbal barbarism, he is more willing to compromise on policy and less likely to take costly symbolic positions or hold out for Pyrrhic victories than his younger, more ideological competitors.
Perhaps most importantly, they also talk like that. Therefore the Wharton transfer student and the boy who he graduated at the end of his law class, Lower Middle Old is their mother tongue. In the mouths of the youngest products of the high-intensity meritocratic rat race, this register of American dialect sounds odd, and given that only about one-third of American adults have a college degree, that matters a lot. In fact, it is in many ways the most convincing of the three explanations. It’s also the most depressing thing, not so much because of what it says about Biden and Trump, but because of what it says about younger politicians: They don’t think like non-college voters and therefore can’t communicate with them as well.
It is very risky to depend so much on people who are already in their golden years, who will not be with us forever. And what will American politics be like when the front row kids who doesn’t know about old half short are the only ones left in the room?
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