Are U.S. Presidents Getting Older? They Aren’t.
Donald Trump was the oldest U.S. president ever to be inaugurated. All front-runners for the 2020 Democratic nomination are older than 70. It is easy to believe that U.S. presidents have been getting older. As whole countries age rapidly and longevity experts predict that we all will live to be 100 soon, surely U.S. presidents are also becoming greyer?
The short answer: No, they are not. The long answer (supported by statistical analysis): Also no.
Taking a look at all presidents’ ages at the time of their inauguration since George Washington in 1789, there is no clear trend visible to the naked eye. The four people who are most likely to get a shot at the presidency in 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, are in fact older than all former presidents, but since only one will win the 2020 election, it’s too soon to be calling older presidents a trend.
Before Trump and the 2020 line-up, presidents’ ages were actually well below average. Barack Obama took office at 47 years and 169 days, according to Potus.com, making him the fifth youngest president ever. Bill Clinton, who was 46 when he took over, was the third youngest president at the time of inauguration.
“Old Tippecanoe” was, well, … old
Some of the oldest presidents actually hail from past centuries. William Henry Harrison (nicknamed “Old Tippecanoe”) was 68 at his inauguration in 1841 (he died a month later of typhoid and pneumonia), making him the third-oldest president ever. James Buchanan (“Old Buck”) took office in 1857, which made him the fourth-oldest president at 65. Zachary Taylor (“Old Rough and Ready”) was also — you guessed it — comparably old, being 64 at the time of his inauguration.
Those older presidents of the 1800s are also the reason why a statistical trend shows the president’s age at inauguration to be steady, even decreasing slightly by 0.02 years, since 1789. In fact, the first presidents of the U.S. all took office at ages well above the average inauguration age of 55 years.
Younger presidents became the norm in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest president ever to be inaugurated, took office in 1901 at the age of 42. From the mid-1900, presidents grew older once again, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush being two examples of this trend.
We don’t know yet if any of the Democratic front-runners will capture the presidency, but if they do, they would certainly tip the scales of presidential age trends. While even Elizabeth Warren would reverse the trend to show a (slight) increase in age, Bernie Sanders would single-handedly raise the average inauguration age by more than half a year.
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