![]() “It’s a legitimate question to ask, about my age,” Biden said yesterday on The View, during his first interview of the race. Several candidates’ aides have quietly pushed an argument about Biden in particular that’s similar to his own old “dear old dad” attack.īiden has made clear in private conversations with aides that he doesn’t like being seen as old, and that’s part of why he won’t engage in any suggestion that he should serve only one term. They believe Trump helps blunt the issue too: He still refuses to release his medical records, and he’s better known for live-tweeting Fox News than for the kind of marathon schedules that both Biden and Sanders like to keep up on the campaign trail.īut at least 18 Democrats running for president think voters want something fresh: not only someone younger, but someone who represents a whole new start-that’s the best way the party can contrast itself with Trump. And the race is happening as young people are voting more: Census data released earlier this week found that from 2014 to 2018, there was a 79 percent jump in voting among people ages 18 to 29.īiden and Sanders aides told me they see the age of the other Democratic front-runner as largely neutralizing the age issue, even as internal worries persist that it could prove one of their biggest liabilities with voters. Beto O’Rourke was about a month old when that News Journal column ran. Five of the Democrats running weren’t even born when Biden first ran for Senate and Sanders was still just a gadfly in local Vermont politics. “I am a young, vibrant man.”īefore they’re able to take on Trump, however, Biden and Sanders will have to confront a field full of candidates young enough to be their children. “I look at Joe, I don’t know about him … They’re all making me look very young, both in terms of age and in terms of energy,” he said on Friday, getting onto a helicopter on the White House lawn. Trump wants age to be an issue-he thinks it helps him. ![]() But the early months (at least) of the 2020 race are going to be dominated by three white men in their 70s arguing about how to make America great again: Donald Trump is turning 73 in June, Biden is 76, Bernie Sanders is 77. The ad, which appeared in The News Journal, Delaware’s major newspaper, happened to run under a column that described Biden’s newly combative strategy in the closing days of the race.īiden’s approach then, according to the columnist, was “in effect, ‘Dear old dad may have been right for his time-and I love him-but things are different now.’” The newspaper ad ran a few weeks before the 1972 Senate election in Delaware, when the upstart 29-year-old was challenging a 63-year-old incumbent.
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