‘A seismic shift’

Political scientist Lee Miringoff is a big baseball fan.

Speaking from Dutchess County, New York, Miringoff mentions a friend who buys seats to watch the Yankees up close. When the pair attend games, they sit mere feet from the dugout, watching the players prep for their at-bats and hustle to and from the field.

“It’s a wonderful place to see the game, except when you realise how young they all are,” he quipped.

He lets loose a jovial chuckle when thinking about Yankee pitcher Tommy John.

“He was in his 40s when he retired, and he was the oldest pitcher on the team,” said Miringoff, who is 73 and currently the longest-tenured employee at Marist College. “Now, how do you think Tommy John makes me feel?!”

Age is top of mind for Miringoff, who heads the college’s Institute for Public Opinion.

After all, he believes it played an outsized role in the 2024 United States presidential election. And that’s largely the result of one prominent figure: outgoing President Joe Biden.

Biden turned 82 last Wednesday, breaking his own record as the oldest sitting president in US history. When he entered the White House at age 78, Biden had already surpassed the previous title holder, the late Ronald Reagan, who exited office at 77 years old.

As Biden prepares to leave the White House in January after a single term as president, experts say part of his legacy will be in re-shaping how age is perceived in US politics.

“Ageism is a symptom of a much bigger malaise,” said Gemma Carney, a social policy and ageing researcher at Queen’s University in Belfast. “And we’re seeing a seismic shift in who we want to lead us.”

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.”

But experts say Biden’s candidacy in the most recent presidential election has contributed to subtle shifts in perception.

In February, a special counsel report described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. In the aftermath, news outlets like NPR highlighted age as Biden’s “biggest vulnerability”.

Those concerns grew after the first presidential debate in June, when Biden faced the leading Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump.

Biden walked onto the debate stage stiffly. He struggled to complete his thoughts. His performance even prompted his fellow Democrats to speculate about his continued ability to hold office.

“I think it's a legitimate question to say: Is this an episode or is this a condition?” Representative Nancy Pelosi said on the news channel MSNBC.

A subsequent New York Times headline even declared Biden’s age to be “the problem in plain sight”.

Biden attempted to brush off the ensuing media frenzy. “I know I’m not a young man,” he told a rally in North Carolina in late June.

But by the next month, the concerns forced him to drop out of the presidential race. His vice president, 60-year-old Kamala Harris, replaced him as the Democratic Party's nominee. She ultimately lost the election on November 5 to Trump.

For all of the focus on Biden’s age, the election resulted in the victory of a candidate who will likely surpass the Democrat’s record as the oldest sitting president.

Trump, at 78 years old, will be slightly older than Biden is now if and when he completes his second term in the White House in 2029.

In the weeks since the election night, presidential historian Mark Updegrove has been thinking about the issues that will “haunt” Biden’s legacy.

Updegrove considers age to be one of the factors that “sunk” Biden. But Trump, Updegrove argues, has shown a unique resiliency in the face of similar criticism.

“We don’t apply the same standards to Trump that we do for other people,” Updegrove said. “We accept his flaws — even if they would’ve sunk anyone else.”

Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, credits Trump’s pugnacious style on the campaign trail as helping to assuage concerns about his age, compared with Biden’s.

"It’s not that age doesn’t matter to voters; it does," said Miringoff. "It’s that Republicans have figured out a way to make it not matter as much to their voters."

Miringoff added that perhaps the greatest example of Trump’s ability to defy age-based stereotypes was his reaction to the attempt on his life in July.

“When he got up on stage, pumped his fist and yelled, ‘Fight, fight, fight,’ he didn’t seem old. That matters more than you might think,” Miringoff said.

Polling showed this public image resonated with young men, according to Miringoff. The perception was: “He doesn’t take any guff.”

Carney, meanwhile, observed that Republicans used the discourse around Biden’s age to portray the Democrats as out of touch.

When Biden was forced to exit the presidential race, Carney said the Republicans adopted another tactic, too. They played on fears that older, white men like Biden were losing some of their power.

Trump himself articulated that view at his final campaign rally on November 4. “They ripped that presidency away from Joe Biden,” he said of the Democrats’ switch from Biden to Harris.

Carney explained that this viewpoint helped bolster support for Trump among older, male voters.

“The loss of privilege can feel like oppression for white American men who now see women and minorities — those childless cat ladies — as having more power than they deserve,” she said.

That targeted appeal can pay dividends at the ballot box. Research has shown that, in several democracies including the US, older generations are more likely to vote.

"This leads to the ‘representation gap'", Carney writes in a soon-to-be-published article, "whereby the views of younger generations are underrepresented, while those of older generations are over-represented".

But polls indicate that Trump is not immune from scrutiny over his age. The market research firm YouGov found that, over the duration of the 2024 race, concerns about his age and health have increased as well.

Between February and October, the number of YouGov respondents who said Trump was too old for the White House rose from 35 to 44 percent.

In 2024, there was also a slight uptick in the number of survey participants who considered it fair game to scrutinise a presidential candidate’s health. An estimated 72 percent indicated it was fair, up from 61 percent in 2020.

For Carney, the bipartisan focus on Biden’s age highlights key differences between how identities are perceived — and attacked — on the campaign trail.

“I think the most important question is why Democrats chose to weaponise Biden’s age against him,” she said.

“If a woman or African American president gave a bad performance at a debate, it would not be acceptable to say that it was due to their gender or race. Why was it okay to say that Biden was too old?"

The questions raised this election cycle about Biden’s age and ability may have long-lasting repercussions beyond the White House as well.

In the wake of the election, media reports have suggested that Democratic Congress members had urged 70-year-old Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down.

Their fear was that, if Sotomayor's health prevented her from outlasting the Trump presidency, her death or departure would create an opportunity for Trump to replace her on the court bench. Sotomayor has long lived with diabetes, heightening Democrats’ concerns.

"To be clear: she could easily — and God willing — survive a potential Trump second term and still be dishing out dissents from the bench come 2029," commentator Mehdi Hasan wrote in The Guardian earlier this year. "But why take that risk? Why not retire now?"

While the Democrats try to plan their future post-Biden, Catherine MacDonald, director of the Virginia Center on Aging, said Americans need a broader reckoning with age, particularly as they live longer.

"We have a gerontocracy, but many of us truly struggle to create an image for ourselves in our old age," she explained. "We've been working for generations to expand our lifetime, and now we're finally reaching it, and we're like, 'Woah, what do we do with this?'"

MacDonald wishes people would focus less on age in politics.

"The conversations about Biden and Trump being old contribute to the shame of ageing," she said. "What I'd ask is, 'Will this person recognise our shared humanity?'"

She believes the conversation Biden inspired is a reflection of deep-seated anxieties and prejudices in US society.

"I think the truth is, most of us are ageist," MacDonald told Al Jazeera. "But I don't think age tells us much about how someone should lead."

For his part, Miringoff said he is not discouraged by the scrutiny over Biden’s age. He joked that it may be time to run for a race of his own. Why not in New Hampshire?

"I’ve been going there since 1988," he said. "And all this talk is making me think I could make a go of it."

After all, he quipped, "I’m only in my early 70s!"