With 81-year-old Joe Biden out of this year’s presidential race, the average age of the 2024 presidential tickets is getting closer to the national average. Biden‘s heir apparent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is 59, which technically makes her a young baby boomer. But she’s only one year off from Generation X, which is close enough for that lost demographic to claim their first major presidential candidate.
Among Harris’s leading VP contenders, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly is 60, but he’s an astronaut, which cuts 10 years off his implied age. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is 46. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is 51. The Democratic ticket is very likely to look demographically normal.
On the other side, Republican VP nominee JD Vance is a mere 39, making him the first millennial to be on a major presidential ticket. Youth abounds.
Now for the odd man out. Republican nominee Donald Trump, 78, now holds the honor of oldest presidential candidate ever. That would have been Biden, had he held on long enough to be formally nominated at the Democratic convention in August. Instead, the frail Biden finally bowed to mounting Democratic pressure and withdrew, saying, “The best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.”
If Trump were to follow Biden’s lead and pass the torch himself, it would end the Tyranny of the Boomers and create the fresh start many Americans have been craving.
Biden, born in 1942, is technically a member of the Silent Generation, but he's close enough to the boomer start date — 1946 — to qualify as a boomer+. For a lot of American voters these days, the boomer and Silent politicians of the last 30 years have this in common: They talk about growing up in the ancient times known as the 1950s and are grandparent-aged, or older.
Bill Clinton was the first baby boomer president. He played a sax on TV and chose a Fleetwood Mac song as his campaign theme. It seemed pretty cool at the time, even if you weren’t a boomer. I’m an Xer, and to me, Bill Clinton in 1992 seemed familiar, like my parents, except cooler.
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Every president since then has been a boomer or older. That’s 32 straight years of boomer + silent domination. The boomer birth years ran from 1946 to 1964, or just 18 years. They’ve been massively overrepresented in the White House. Donald Trump, who is running to be the sixth boomer president in a row, was born in 1946, the same year as George W. Bush, who first ran for president 24 years ago and who left office 15 years ago.
Enough of the old fellas!
It's not personal. Boomers helped make the United States the world’s most prosperous nation and create its dominant economy. Some boomers served in Vietnam and in other wars. They set a standard for American optimism that they’re taking into retirement.
At the same time, boomers are only one-fifth of the US population. They’re the generation on track to break Social Security and Medicare — not by cashing in their benefits, but by failing to stabilize these crucial programs during the three decades they’ve run the US government. Boomer politicians have created a system in which the young inordinately subsidize the old.
In general, that’s the way public pension plans are supposed to work. Except that the budget math is completely out of whack. Of the $35 trillion national debt, boomers have racked up $31 trillion, or 89% of it. That’s like maxing out all your credit cards before you die and letting your heirs deal with the debt.
A healthy society takes care of its old but also invests in its young because they represent the future. America is too skewed toward the old. We have subpar education, patchy and expensive childcare for working parents, and an appallingly high rate of “deaths of despair.” These aren’t simple problems to solve, but leaders closer in age and experience to these real-life strains might offer more action and fewer platitudes.
Trump, of course, isn’t likely to give up his chance to win a second presidential term, which he feels he deserves. But Biden stubbornly clung to power too, until the public essentially forced him out by panning his terrible June 27 debate performance, pushing him ever lower in the polls and showing way more enthusiasm for Harris as his replacement.
Voters can do the same to Trump, if not soon, then in November.
Correction: This story originally said Joe Biden is a baby boomer, the generation whose birth dates range from 1946 to 1964. Biden was born in 1942 and is technically a member of the so-called Silent Generation. We regret the error.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.
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