There’s a reason young voters are flocking to Sinn Féin not Fine Gael - it has nothing to do with age gap between leaders

At 77, Bill Clinton is almost three years younger than Joe Biden. He is younger (if only by a few weeks) than Donald Trump. Clinton’s term of office as US president ended in January 2001. Joe Biden was born during the second World War and will be 80 soon. But in comparison to some other American politicians, Biden is the young ‘un in the room.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has announced that she will not run in the next election, is 90. Nancy Pelosi, until recently Speaker of the House, is 83. Among Republicans, Chuck Grassley, former president pro tempore (officially, the person who leads the Senate when the vice-president is absent) is 89. He was first elected to the Senate in 1980, the year that The Empire Strikes Back was released. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate whose freezing episodes have inspired a mini-industry of amateur diagnosis, is 81.

The Republicans gleefully repost every gaffe and stumble made by Joe Biden but as my mother-in-law, who sadly died relatively young, used to say, “When I get old, you may quake in fear.” Donald Trump at 77 is hardly a fresh young blossom.

Leaders in Europe are generally much younger. Sanna Marin, the youngest prime minister in Europe when she was elected in Finland at age 34, has recently been replaced by Petteri Orpo, who is 53.

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Here in Ireland, where political leaders are, comparatively speaking, relatively young, Leo Varadkar is 44. While Eamon Ryan and Micheál Martin are 60 and 63 respectively, both are spring chickens in comparison to prominent US politicians. Very few are troubled by Michael D Higgins’s age of 82. There are far more complaints about the degree of elasticity he allows himself when it comes to the constraints of the presidency than there are about his mental competency.

But here’s the weird thing. The soon-to-be octogenarian Biden received 61 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds’ votes in the presidential election, while 36 per cent of that cohort voted for Trump. If Bernie Sanders, the preferred candidate of the young, had succeeded in becoming the Democratic candidate, the youth vote would have been even more enormous. And he is 81, even older than Biden. That vote was not age-based.

I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience

—  Ronald Reagan to Walter Mondale

In Ireland, although our leaders are younger, in the last Irish Times/IPSOS poll, only Sinn Féin was attracting significant numbers of voters between 18 and 35. It doesn’t have much to do with the age of the party’s leader: Mary Lou McDonald is 54. Fianna Fáil would be thrilled to match Donald Trump’s 2020 young adult vote, while Fine Gael, with a young leader in Government, is doing only marginally better.

[ Sinn Féin quietly jettisons controversial policies as power beckons ]

However, in the US, the youth vote is likely to look very different in the next presidential election. John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and widely credited with advising Joe Biden on how to appeal to younger voters in the last election, is sounding warnings. There, younger voters are embracing Mercutio’s dying words in Romeo and Juliet: a plague o’ both your houses. They are much more likely to identify as non-aligned to either the Democratic or Republican Parties or to see politics as irrelevant. Many young voters may not vote at all in the next election.

Ageism

That is also a problem that Ireland shares. Sadly, we may be back to a situation where emigration from Ireland will be more likely than political engagement.

What about the allegation that ageism is motivating the criticism of older politicians?

The key issue is not age but competence and appearing to offer something fresh. Young people are turning to Sinn Féin in droves because they do not believe that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will do anything substantial to improve the housing crisis

Everyone remembers Ronald Reagan’s famous quip in response to concerns about being 73 going into the 1984 presidential election. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even his opponent, Walter Mondale, laughed. It was a great line. However, Reagan eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s, and research from 2015 shows that he may have had subtle impairments during his time in the White House. (Mind you, if as a researcher suggests in a New York Times article about Reagan’s decline, “relying on well-rehearsed phrases and simple words” is an early sign of cognitive decline, Trump is in trouble.)

The key issue is not age but competence and appearing to offer something fresh. Young people are turning to Sinn Féin in droves because they do not believe that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will do anything substantial to improve the housing crisis. (They may also believe that Sinn Féin is unlikely to deliver, but have no confidence in the status quo.)

[ Calming America – Frank McNally on how the Ronald Reagan shooting made a celebrity of an Irish-American doctor ]

US voters feel the same frustration for different reasons with Biden and Trump but have no alternative. It’s not so much that they are old, but they are more of the same old, same old.

While everyone remembers Reagan’s riposte, few remember Bill Clinton’s reply when the boot was on the other foot and he was being challenged because he was much younger and far less experienced than his 73-year-old opponent, Bob Dole. Clinton retorted: “I don’t think Senator Dole is too old to be president. It is the age of his ideas that I question.”