I am not an “ageist”. I dont vote on the basis of age, just like I dont vote on the basis of sex, or race, or religion. Health is an okay metric, as long as one does not assume that “old= sick”.
Nor should anyone.
I would vote for a chimpanzee before anyone the 2024 version of the R party could possibly nominate.
There was a time 40 years ago when I could vote either way depending on which party fielded a better candidate. Those days are over and may not come back for another century. Which will of course be moot for me personally.
But for 2024 it’s a slam dunk: no sane American can vote for any R for any office.
I doubt it would ever be the deciding factor (see, Biden v. DeSantis for example) but it is a factor. I would much prefer someone in their 50s or 60s to 80s and 90s.
It’s probably mostly a factor in the primaries.
Hey! I thought I was doing that?? 
I would have thought that was the express purpose of the 25th Amendment ?
Yes, but even in a case where this is a legitimate use, you know there would be controversy, and some people might hesitate to act because of that. For example, do you want the cabinet debating the President’s condition just after they hear news that Putin has nuked Kyiv? As we saw with Trump, just having a mechanism to deal with a problematic President isn’t enough, if the people in charge of carrying out that process don’t do their jobs well.
The mere fact there is a back-up plan does not mean we should deliberately set up a situation with a very high probability of needing to use it.
That’s Engineering 101. And Politics 101.
You aren’t going to get an argument from me on that regard.
However, at the start of the Watergate process it was commonly thought that impeachment was without modern precedent and would create controversy, now it seems a standard political strategy (when you have the numbers).
There is intense, obsessive media interest in health issues involving Presidents and Presidential candidates - such as the current breathless discussions of “Biden’s cancer OMG!” (an inconsequential basal cell skin carcinoma).
Much but not all of this patter, distraction and exploitation can be avoided by not nominating super-geriatric candidates.
Of course not. Putin nuking Kyiv wouldn’t change the President’s condition. If he was incompetent right after the nuking, then he was also incompetent before it, and should already have been replaced.
Naw, that’s not all of it. Even old men have a shorter life expectancy than their female age-mates.
Of course. Warren is pretty old, but i wasn’t particularly worried about her age. I felt that both Biden and Trump were well past their “best by” dates.
That being said, I’m one of the people who voted “85 is too old”, but i don’t think it’s an absolute. You always need to consider the alternatives.
Except that stress makes a difference with things like dementia. No one wants to be the first one to say they think the President has lost it, so they might make excuses for some lapses, thinking it doesn’t really matter. But then, Putin nukes Kyiv, the stress levels hit highs they haven’t seen ever before, and maybe the President suddenly gets so bad that no one can deny it any longer. So you’re stuck trying to get a vote on the 25th amendment at the same time everyone else in the world is freaking out about armageddon, and looking to the US for leadership.
The decade from 1935 to 1945 was the decade of Strongmen. FDR was elected (again) in 1944 and died in office shortly before the surrender of Germany, ending the War in Europe. Truman, his successor, authorized the first use of atomic weapons against Japan, bringing the War in the Pacific to a sudden, conclusive close within the year.
In hindsight it is apparent that FDR was far too ill to have run for his final term. However, his administration and the Democratic Party must have felt that only they could win the War to End Wars and that they needed to retain power to do that. Except for a minority who were opposed to the FDR’s Liberal economic policies from before his third term, Democratic voters and the American Public were generally approving if not enthusiastic about his fourth. Nobody in the majority inquired too closely about the health of the candidate. This is the lesson: Arrogance can overtake democracies just as it can dictatorships. Term limits and age limits (formal or informal) are palliative but not a cure. The USA took a massive risk in a dangerous era of global instability by electing a candidate who was too ill to discharge the duties of office.
Would any of the alternatives (to running and re-electing FDR and having Truman take over) have worked out better?
FDR obviously wasn’t too ill to get re-elected—which is an example of how what it takes to get elected and what it takes to discharge the duties of office can be two very different things. Is it a reasonable strategy to select a candidate who is old or ill but electable, and pair them with a running mate who would do a good job as president even though they may not have the charisma or name-recognition to get elected in their own right?
At any rate, the older or less robust a presidential candidate is, the more important it becomes to take a good hard look at their running mate.
122 is what I think the maximum age should be at the moment, but I suspect the maximum will go up in the future:
… difficult to say. The way things worked out fulfilled some of Churchill’s darkest forebodings.
Certainly FDR’s age was a factor in selecting Truman for Veep, so the convention had premonitions.
Would the candidates gender/sex be a factor? Race?
Sex is a factor in life expectancy. Gender, being social rather than biological, is not (except in the sense that gender-nonconforming people are often subject to violence). Race isn’t either: there are sociological reasons that someone of a particular race might have a lower life expectancy, but there aren’t inherent to the condition of being that race. I would assume that a viable candidate for president of any race or gender would have individual circumstances that mitigated the lower life expectancy of their gender (if, say, gay or trans) / race. In other words, actuarial tables point out that Black people have a lower life expectancy, but it’s not because they’re Black human beings, it’s because they’re Black in America, with everything that says about access to education, wealth, and healthcare.
Not sufficiently so as to overwhelm their positions.
All else being equal? I’d vote for greater representation of the underrepresented. But all else is never equal.
That’s my view too.
Age, however, matters. I’ve known people 85 and older. With out exception, they’re old. Not demented (usually) but old enough for me to notice decline. Our presidents are not expected to compete on Jeopardy, (wisdom is better than quickness for the job) but I prefer younger. I don’t think that’s an obnoxious way to feel. I also don’t way 90 year old commercial airline pilots.