The upended questions of age and generation in presidential politics

A month ago, the 2024 presidential election was slated to feature the two oldest candidates in American history. President Biden, 81, was seeking to defend his position in the face of a challenge from former president Donald Trump, 78.

Despite the relatively narrow difference in their ages, polling showed that the issue posed more of a challenge for the incumbent than the former president. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 58 percent of Americans viewed both candidates as too old for another term as president, with another (heavily Republican) quarter saying that only Biden was. The presidential debate in late June cemented concerns about Biden’s age, and a month later he passed the baton to Vice President Harris, 59.

You know all this. What you might not realize is that, despite poll findings like the one cited above, the question of age has largely faded to the background — though the question of a generational power transition has not.

One interesting effect of Biden’s poor performance in that first debate is that while perceptions of his unfitness rose, so did those perceptions for Trump. In early June, YouGov polling conducted for the Economist found that 26 percent of Americans thought Trump’s age severely limited his ability to do the job of president. By late July, after Biden dropped out, more than a third said that about Trump.

But that’s largely because of a big jump in the number of Democrats who say that Trump’s age is a severe limitation. There was a nearly 20-point increase among Democrats — perhaps in part because they felt newly free to suggest that age might be a hindrance to a candidacy.

There was another change since June, too: Both major-party candidates have now selected their running mates. Trump chose Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as the Republican convention began last month. On Tuesday, Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).

Vance is the youngest member of a presidential ticket in decades, the first member of the millennial generation to be a major-party nominee for president or vice president. Walz, on the other hand, was born in 1964 — the same year as Harris.

When Vance was first named, I made the chart below to show his unique position as a millennial. Harris and Walz — like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Trump, Barack Obama and myriad other candidates before them — are members of the baby boom generation.

Since this question of generational identity comes up not infrequently (and since I have some expertise on the subject), it’s worth noting that the baby boom as a demographic event wrapped up in mid-1964, while the generation is generally said to apply to everyone born that year. In other words, Walz (born in April) was a member of the baby boom itself, while Harris (born in October) wasn’t. Whether this makes her the second member of Gen X to be on a major-party ticket (after former Wisconsin congressman Paul D. Ryan) is up to your own subjective determination.

Notice on the above chart, though, that Harris and Walz (those overlapping circles at the right-most boundary of boomers and Gen X) sit closer to Trump than to Vance. Each will be 60 by the end of the year, giving them a cumulative age of 120 years — more than the 118 years of the Trump-Vance ticket. Each is above the 116.3-year-old average since 1976.

But age, as the saying has it, ain’t nothing but a number. For at least one prominent member of the Democratic coalition, the Walz pick marks a transition in political thinking.

“It does feel like a generational shift,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a live stream on Instagram a few hours after the Walz announcement. “And by that I mean the kinds of generational politics that the Democratic Party is trying to practice now is a real departure from years past.”

She noted that “a generational shift doesn’t just mean that you’re electing younger people,” pointing to support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. Harris’s selection of Walz, while a reinforcement of the dominance of the baby boom (see caveats above) was nonetheless in her estimation a marked shift in how Democrats do politics, one respecting the ideology of younger voters. This is a useful argument for her to make as one of the figures most crucial to energizing young voters, but that doesn’t mean she is incorrect or insincere in making it.

This question of age, though? Revamped. Trump would be older at this point in a second term than Biden is now, but he has largely escaped similar scrutiny (in large part because Biden’s manifestations of his age were more obvious). The Democratic nominee is far younger, but the ticket slightly older — even though it does mark a generational shift in either delineation (how you draw the baby boom boundary) or approach (to hear Ocasio-Cortez tell it).

It is, to put it glibly, not the same old race.