Good news for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders: Voters don't care that they're old


The 2016 race offers voters candidates from several different generations: There are Gen Xers like Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal, each 44, and lots of Baby Boomers both young — like Rand Paul (52) and Martin O'Malley (also 52) — and old — like Donald Trump (69) and Hillary Clinton (68). Finally, Bernie Sanders, running at 74, is a member of the Silent Generation born before 1945.
Yet while much has been made of the relative old age of the Democratic field, a new McClatchy-Marist poll finds voters aren't too worried about electing an elderly president. More than seven in 10 voters see age as an advantage for the presidency, while fewer than a quarter are concerned about possible health risks.
These results will be music to the ears of the Clinton campaign following their candidate's recent remark that she is "from the '60s, a long time ago."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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