Too Old to Be President?

• Author: Semra Sevi
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221118344
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(6) 752–756

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221118344

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Too Old to Be President?

Semra Sevi

1

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Abstract

The overrepresentation of advanced age among elites is a rising concern in democracies such as the United States. In 2016,

American voters elected Donald Trump—at the time the oldest president to enter off‌ice—and in 2020 Joe Biden beat that

record. Theories of descriptive representation suggest that voters should be less likely to support older candidates when age

becomes a salient campaign issue. Indeed, age raises questions about a candidate’s physical and mental health, and thus their

f‌itness to serve in off‌ice. The present study reports on a survey experiment conducted during the 2020 Democratic Presidential

primaries, which featured several candidates in their seventies, all running to replace an incumbent president of the same age

group. Priming age did not affect voters’assessments of any particular candidate’s ability to win the general election. These

results are inconsistent with existing studies of age effects using hypothetical candidate s. Possible causes of this discrepancy are

addressed in the discussion.

Keywords

age, descriptive representation, vote choice, candidates, Democratic primaries

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not

going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s

youth and inexperience.”

–Ronald Reagan, 1984

Introduction

In recent years, the age of politicians has increasingly become

a salient topic of media coverage.

1

In the United States, there

is a debate about the possible rise of “gerontocracy”and its

ramif‌ications for American democracy.

2

In 2016, Donald

Trump and Hilary Clinton—who at the time were 70 and 69,

respectively—made headlines for their age, as either one of

them would have become the oldest individual to be elected

president. In the most recent US presidential election, which

was held in 2020, Americans had to once again choose

between the two oldest major-party presidential candidates in

US history––Joe Biden at 77 and Donald Trump at 74.

While most political systems have minimum age re-

quirements for candidates, much rarer are maximum age

limits. This is because life expectancy used to be much

shorter, but humans are living longer now than ever before

(Vespa,2 018). Existing studies on political elites suggest that

legislative bodies across the world overrepresent older voices

(Eshima & Smith, 2022;Norris 1997;Stockemer & Aksel

Sundstrom, 2018;Sevi, 2021). This has important conse-

quences for descriptive and substantive democratic repre-

sentation, as we have reason to believe that older politicians

are less likely to cater to younger voters (Curry & Haydon,

2018;McClean, 2021).

One reason that political elites are older could be that

voters generally prefer older candidates, perceiving younger

candidates to have less experience and qualif‌ications to serve.

However, research on voters’attitudes towards candidates’

age is limited. This research note reports the results of a

survey experiment in the context of the 2020 Democratic

primaries, which featured 28 contenders. The candidates

included six women, the f‌irst openly gay candidate, and two

billionaires. In a historic f‌irst, 2020 was also the f‌irst pres-

idential election cycle in which most of the major candidates

were septuagenarians: Joe Biden (77), Michael Bloomberg

(77), Bernie Sanders (78) and Elizabeth Warren (70). There

were also two younger candidates: Pete Buttigieg (38) and

Amy Klobuchar (59). All of them were vying to beat the

oldest-ever f‌irst-term president, Donald Trump, who turned

74 on June 14, 2020. Thus, this was an ideal setting to as-

certain age effects in vote choice. Democratic primary voters

had the task of not only deciding whether an older candidate

should be the Democratic Party’s nominee, but also assessing

whether said candidate could unseat the incumbent in the

general election.

1

Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Semra Sevi, Columbia University, Mail Code 3320, New York, NY 10027-

6902, USA.

Email: ss6479@columbia.edu