Marcotte apparently doesn't remember who voted for the under-40 Pete Buttigieg in the early 2020 primaries: older voters, while younger voters flocked to Bernie Sanders, who is older than Joe Biden.
There's no question that two older major-party candidates are refusing to step aside, and other seniors are running for president or thinking about it. (Joe Manchin is 76 and Jill Stein is 73, while Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West are both 70.)
But in polls of an imaginary Biden-less Democratic field, Kamala Harris generally beats Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren, though Michelle Obama occasionally wins. (She's technically a Boomer because she was born in the last year of the Boom, 1964, but she's younger than Biden and Trump.) In a Biden-less three-way poll conducted in November, Vice President Harris trounced Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson -- don't forget that Williamson is not only a Boomer at age 71, she's advocates a particularly Boomer-esque form of New Age spiritualism.
On the Republican side, there's even less evidence that older voters are demanding deference to their generation. Sure, Republican voters love Trump, but it's him they love, not his age. They want to revert to an imagined Golden Age that favored rural heterosexual Christian whites at the expense of everyone else, but they're fine if the authoritarian who imposes this cultural backlash isn't a generational peer: In poll after poll after poll of a hypothetical Trump-free field, Republicans' preferred candidate is fortysomething tyrant-wannabe Ron DeSantis.
The Democratic Party coalesced around Biden in 2020 not because of his age, but because he seemed to be the only candidate who could win both white and Black votes. Harris, Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar -- none of them seemed able to do that. In addition, Biden's apparent left-centrism was satisfactory to rich donors, who feared Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
A different candidate who had cross-racial appeal could have won the nomination, regardless of age. But no such candidate existed. Or the party could have taken a chance on progessivism -- but the top progressive candidates were also Boomers.
And this year, Democrstic voters are sticking with the incumbent -- which is what always happens when a party holds the White House.
We'll move past this generational logjam soon. But it's not happening now just because old voters won't let go.
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