Problem with Old White Men as POTUS?

As usual, I get exhausted by all the political back and forth months prior to an actual presidential election. Not enough to skip voting, mind you.

But one political argument this Leap Year election cycle motivated me to take a deep dive. Namely, is Biden too old to be president?

My gut instinct told me “no.” Since the start of the United States of America on July 4th, 1776, my country has NEVER had any problems with older white men leading the country. Especially given the fact that only one POTUS hasn’t been white and none have ever identified as female. The rest of the answer lie in comparing how old each POTUS was at the start of his presidency and the average life expectancy at the time.

Granted, statistics isn’t my favorite mathematical branch, I’d hoped that someone else had crunched the numbers. There was one article that compared the president’s age to former presidents and their contemporaries, but I wanted to see the numbers for myself.

I had no idea the challenge I’d set up for myself. Listing all the presidents in chronological order, along with how old they were when they started their presidency were the easy parts. Finding consistent data about the average life expectancy during the start year of each presidency was far more work, considering that I limited my search to internet sites.

After all, I wouldn’t invest too much time in research, which, in the end, left my data table with 17 gaps under the “Average Life Expectancy” column. Even the numbers that appear under that column weren’t the ideal “apples to apples” comparison, but strongly reflected the historical bias of the United States.

For example, prior to Emancipation, enslaved people were only considered three-fifths of a person and they certainly weren’t counted in the average life expectancy data that I saw, given how vastly different the average enslaved person lived compared to the average white person.

Nonetheless there were differences within the data for whites. Some data only showed white men. Others brokedown data among white men and women at various ages during that year. Other data showed the average life expectancy averaged among a number of years.

Even with the gaps and variety of methods to calculate the average, clear patterns emerged. First of all, people are living longer for a variety of reasons: advances in modern medicine, better personal hygiene, clean drinking water. Ironically, one of the medical innovations was the discovery and use of vaccines. Given the current anti-vaccine movement, which may have contributed to life expectancy lowering during the COVID pandemic, vaccines helped increase life expectancy over the last few centuries.

When George Washington became the first POTUS, he may have seemed quite old at the time since he was 57 and the estimated average life expectancy was 34.5 years. In 2021, when Biden became the 46th POTUS at age 78, he was only a few years older than estimated average of 76.1 years.

Looking at the table at the end of this blog post, one can see that 17 presidents in a row, from Harding to Trump, were actually younger than the average life expectancy. Then, a global pandemic hit and the average life expectancy in the US actually declined, so when Biden became the oldest president (a designation that Trump once held when he was elected), he did so with a lower average life expectancy than his predecessor.

One of the Republican election talking points that was driven home by Nikki Haley (besides “keep my daughter’s name out of your voice”) was that the United States needed a younger generation of leaders. I thought this was a brilliant because, on the surface, she was criticizing Biden, but she was also taking a jab at Trump who was only a few years younger, but still the same generation as Biden. Haley even turned up the “generational change” rhetoric once she was the sole Republican challenger.

That was about the time when I’d had enough. Would I like to see a younger generation of politicians in office? Yes. Does the United States have a problem voting for old white men?ABSOLUTELY NOT. And it never has. See for yourself in the table below.

You’re invited to do whatever deep-dive research until your heart’s content or until November 2024, whichever comes first.

• #1: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1949/compendia/hist_stats_1789-1945/hist_stats_1789-1945-chC.pdf
• #2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/
• #3: https://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html
• #4: https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/TR02/lr5A3-h.html
• #5: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_07.pdf
• #6: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_07-508.pdf
• #7: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220831.htm