Protest and pandemic are hurting the US president in the polls. His inability to gauge the national mood could be his undoing
Looked at objectively, it’s an odd choice. On 3 November, the American public, whose median age is around 38 and whose makeup is increasingly ethnically and racially diverse, will be asked to pick one of two elderly white men, each well into his 70s, to run the country for the next four years.
If one of the candidates was much younger – think Bill Clinton versus George HW Bush in 1992 – it might be a big deal. But since both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are relatively old, any negative impact will likely cancel itself out. If Biden wins, he will, at 78, be the oldest president ever to take office, breaking the previous record set by Trump who was a mere 70 in 2017.