President Biden is … not young. He was born under Franklin D. Roosevelt — the third FDR term, not the final one. He’s not a baby boomer; they were born after him.
Framing Biden’s life that way is certainly uncharitable, but it’s also misleading because it suggests he’s wildly unusual. In fact, in 2020, there were 16.6 million other living Americans born in the same year as Biden or earlier, 1 in 20 Americans overall. Biden is the oldest American ever to serve as president — but America itself has a higher density of older people than it ever has had before.
The subject of Biden’s age arose this week as the New York Times reported on skepticism from within his own party about his serving a second term in office. Most Democrats would like the party to nominate someone besides Biden in 2024, and when asked why, about a third said they were concerned primarily about his age.
That spurred an unlikely sort of defense from the man Biden beat to earn his current position. On Truth Social, Donald Trump clarified that the problem wasn’t age, but Biden.
“President Biden is one of the oldest 79s in History, but by and of itself, he is not an old man,” Trump wrote. “There are many people in their 80s, and even 90s, that are as good and sharp as ever. Biden is not one of them, but it has little to do with his age. In actuality, life begins at 80!”
The reason for this is obvious: Trump himself would turn 80 during his second year in office, should he be elected again in 2024. It’s not that 80-year-olds are problematic, Trump insists. It’s that this particular almost-80-year-old is. (Biden turns 80 in November.)
In 2020, the most recent year for which we have Census Bureau data, there were nearly 55.7 million people in the United States aged 65 or over — 16.9 percent of all U.S. residents. That’s the highest percentage in American history — but also a percentage that was passed in 2021 and in 2022 and will be passed again in 2023 and 2024. The bureau projects that by 2060 nearly a quarter of U.S. residents will be aged 65 or over.
There are two reasons for this.
The reason for the immediate surge in the percentage of older Americans is the aforementioned baby boom. The boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Subtract 65 from 2022 and you get 1957, near the heart of that population surge. Over the coming years, more and more people born during that population spike will slip into that age bracket.
The other reason is that people are living longer. Improvements in health care and preventive medicine mean that, horrible setbacks like global pandemics notwithstanding, both younger and older Americans can expect to live longer than past generations.
In 1984, the United States elected Ronald Reagan to a second term in office. He became the oldest person ever to be inaugurated at 73. (Biden is now the record-holder.) But in 1984, the median age in the country was just over 31, compared with 38.3 in 2020. So relative to the population, Reagan was older at inauguration in 1985 than Biden was last year.
(On that chart, I used dotted lines to connect the same candidate/president when they appear more than once. This was done mostly because I thought it looked neat.)
Of course, age relative to the population isn’t really the point. The questions about Biden’s age aren’t really questions about age, as such, but about capacity. Since the 2020 campaign, observers have cast him (often willfully uncharitably) as mentally diminished. The Times’s determination that Democrats view him as too old is, to a large extent, a determination that many Democrats worry he isn’t up for the job. Trump, a nexus of such attacks on Biden, is making the same point.
But as America continues to grow older (in the population sense, not the “existing as a nation” sense), we can continue to expect to see older candidates seeking office — and to see their opponents highlight this as a potential point of weakness.
The Times poll, conducted by Siena College, included an interesting detail. The Democrats most likely to point to Biden’s age as a concern were the oldest Democrats. Perhaps the poll marks a sort of age-related form of the Bradley effect. That term describes how White poll respondents in 1982 purportedly overstated their support for Black California gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley because they wanted the pollsters to think they weren’t opposed to voting for a non-White candidate. Maybe younger Democrats are also concerned about Biden’s age — but didn’t want to make such an admission to a pollster.
Again, Biden is, in fact, old. So is Trump. So are millions of other Americans. Life certainly doesn’t begin at 80, as Trump had it, but it doesn’t necessarily end there, either. The question at hand then isn’t whether an 82-year-old is fit to begin a term as president. It’s whether Biden is.