What We Ask About When We Ask About Joe
Let’s start with an easy one.
How old is Joe Biden?
As this issue goes to press, 77. America’s median age is 38, which means that more than half the country is less than half Biden’s age. If inaugurated on January 20, 2021, exactly two months after he turns 78, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., will be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan was on his last day as president. Reagan was the oldest president prior to Donald Trump, who is three and a half years younger than Biden and became president almost four years ago. As a result, Trump will reach the age of 78 years and seven months in January 2025, at the conclusion of what would be his second term. Biden will be that old in June 2021.
Last year, when Biden was a candidate for the Democratic nomination, he (or at least his advisors) suggested he would serve only one term if elected. Having become the nominee, he said more recently that he would “absolutely” consider seeking a second term in 2024. If that quest overcomes all obstacles, political and medical, Biden would leave office in January 2029 at 86, an age surpassed by only seven ex-presidents.
To think of Biden’s age another way, he is older than his party’s nominee in each of the seven most recent presidential elections: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. One must go back to 86-year-old Michael Dukakis, who lost the 1988 election to George H.W. Bush, to find a Democratic presidential nominee born before Biden was.
How long has Joe Biden been in government?
After serving two years on the New Castle County Council, Biden was elected one of Delaware’s U.S. senators in 1972, weeks before he turned 30 and became constitutionally eligible to take office. (He defeated 63-year-old Republican incumbent Cale Boggs who, the Biden campaign insinuated, was a nice man but no longer really up to the job.) After 36 years in the Senate, during which he attempted unsuccessfully to win his party’s presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008, Biden served two terms as Barack Obama’s vice president. He became a private citizen in 2017 for the first time since 1973.
