3 reasons we’re stuck with Trump and Biden

If 2016 was the most important election in our lifetimes, 2024 is shaping up to be the most dispiriting. We appear to be heading for a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that almost no one except the candidates wants.

In an April NBC poll, nearly two-thirds of voters said they did not think Trump should run for president again — and more than two-thirds said the same thing about Biden, in large part because they think he’s too old. How did a oncegreat nation end up facing an election between two very old, very unpopular white dudes?

I can sketch out the proximate causes. On the Republican side, just as in 2016, a massive primary field is splitting the votes of the moderates, giving Trump plenty of room to consolidate his ultra-maga minority. Democrats, meanwhile, have no good options as long as the vice presidency is occupied by the hapless Kamala D. Harris, whose impolitic blurtings, inability to hold staff and tendency to choke under pressure make her an even less appealing candidate than her boss. Every Democratic operative I’ve asked blanched at the thought of running her — and also agreed that for reasons of coalition management, she cannot be pushed aside.

Yet that only describes the problem; it does not explain why we seem stuck with two broadly disliked candidates, one already in his 80s and the other turning 78 before Election Day 2024. Nor does it explain America’s broader problem of political gerontocracy, as embodied by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-calif.), who seems too cognitively impaired to fully carry out her duties or to realize she ought to retire.

Three explanations, from most benign to most worrying:

First, there’s the fact that American politics rewards name recognition. Other countries may pick their members of parliament from a party list that is curated for competence, stamina and various kinds of diversity, including age. But Americans vote for candidates directly, and since we don’t always do our electoral homework diligently, we often end up simply settling on whichever candidates we know most about.

Whom do we know the most about? Celebrities and people already doing the job.

In this telling, we didn’t vote for two old white dudes; we voted for the most famous candidate in each primary, the former vice president and the reality television star. That’s not great, obviously; it would be nice if well-informed voters made thoughtful choices. But it’s arguably quite democratic. And, as a side effect, it becomes somewhat more likely that our candidates will be old because the longer people live, the more time they have to acquire fame.

The reason to be skeptical of this story is that the longer someone lives, the longer that person also has to lose fame, at least among young voters. Which leads us neatly to the second possible factor: The electorate is getting older, and people like voting for folks who remind them of themselves. To be sure, I can’t prove that older voters identify with Biden and Trump. Yet I can confidently predict that soon after writing this column, my inbox will be filled with missives from people in their seventies and eighties angrily pointing out that old doesn’t mean incompetent.

(I here pause to agree: Age increases the risk of cognitive decline and other ailments, but many people Biden’s age remain knife-sharp and vigorous.)

Yet this can’t be the whole explanation either. Only 16.8 percent of the population is over 65, so most of the voters who brought us the dueling old dudes were young or middleaged.

Here’s a third explanation: The two old white candidates actually have two important political skills, not despite their age but because of it.

Trump and Biden are both relics of an era when America was more stratified by race and gender but less polarized by income, education, ideology or party. And they act like it. For all Trump’s verbal barbarities, he is more willing to compromise on policy and less prone to taking costly symbolic stands or holding out for Pyrrhic victories than are his younger, more ideological competitors.

Perhaps more importantly, they also talk like it. For both the Wharton transfer student and the guy who graduated near the bottom of his law school class, lower-middlebrow is their native language. In the mouths of the younger products of the high-intensity meritocratic rat race, this register of the American dialect sounds foreign — and given that only about one-third of U.S. adults have a college diploma, this matters a lot. In fact, it is in many ways the most compelling of the three explanations. It is also the most depressing, not so much for what it says about Biden and Trump, but for what it says about younger politicians: They don’t think like non-college voters — and therefore can’t communicate so well with them.

It’s very risky to be so dependent on people who are well into their golden years, who will not be with us forever. And what will American politics look like when the front-row kids who can’t speak lowermiddlebrow are the only ones left in the room?