*Age and Citizenship requirements - US Constitution, Article II, Section 1
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.*
Does this mean you cannot run for president until you turn 35, or that you could run for president as long as you turned 35 by election day?
I don’t think they even have to be 35 on election day. A person isn’t President until they’re sworn in on January 20th (current system). I don’t see any reason they would have to be 35 years old before that date. For example, a 21 year old could declare “I’m announcing now that I’m running for president in the election scheduled 14 years from now.” You don’t have to be “eligible” to run, or even to be elected. If you’re eligible to hold the office on the day the job begins, I think you’re fine.
My guess is that this wouldn’t hold up if someone challenged it in court. Like the term limits decision, the courts have found that states can’t erect higher barriers to Federal elective office than what the Constitution provides.
So if someone was 34 on the date of the California primaries, but would be 35 by the time of inauguration, I think they would have a strong case that California would have to let them on the ballot.
Maybe but it’s essentially the same restriction and there’s something to be said for the idea that you must currently be eligible for an office to get on the ballot rather than you will be eligible.
Yet, there are several examples of candidates for Congress running at an age that is ineligible for office, and then either being the required age by the time they are sworn in, or even (IIRC) delaying swearing-in until the candidate’s birthday. Joe Biden was 29 when he won election to the Senate, turned 30 in late November, and was sworn in at age 30 in early January.
Missed edit – it is a fair point that the Constitutional provision on the minimum ages for each House of Congress and the President are written differently. So, who knows?
Constitutionally speaking, nobody is running for president in California or anywhere else. Slates of electors who pledge for certain candidates are running, and in most states those pledges are not binding.
So when the electors meet in December if a candidate turned 35 on, say, January 15 of the following year, an argument could be made that such a person is not “eligible to the office of president” so that an elector could not vote for them.
But I think that is rather hypertechnical. The electors know that they are voting for someone who is taking office next January 20th when the person who is the subject of this particular election will be eligible to the office. I think eligibility is talking about taking the office, not about being voted to take the office.
No. Of course not. The office is vacant on January 20th and any elector who votes for you is voting for someone not eligible to the office on that date.
The question before the electors is not “Is this person immediately eligible to the office on this day?” because it is understood that the person voted for will not taken office then, but take office on January 20th. The question is “Will the person be eligible then?”
The outgoing president’s term ends, no matter what, on January 20th at noon.
But the 20th Amendment says “If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified.” So you could at least try to argue that you’re still eligible to be elected (since not qualifying to be president is, implicitly, not a reason for you to be denied election) but that your VP will act on your behalf until your birthday.
Worth noting that the requirements to run in a particular party’s primary are set by that party, and they’re perfectly free to impose stricter requirements than the law does. To use the obvious example, parties often require that someone running in their primary be in some sense a member of that party, and that’s obviously not a legal requirement for office. Someone who doesn’t meet a particular party’s qualifications can just run under a different party, or as an independent.
Excellent point. So I would think that an elector could vote in December 2020 for a person who does not turn 35 until December 2024, even, and if that person wins, he/she would simply not take office until then. The VP elect would act as President until then.
I don’t think the Constitution recognizes “running for president” as such. To be elected president, you don’t technically have to run for president; you just have to have enough members of the Electoral College vote for you.