How old is too old? Well, American voters have been here before.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are old men.

That’s not ageism, that’s just a chronological fact, relative to the average American life expectancy.

Both were old when they ran against each other in 2020, being older than either Ronald Reagan or Bob Dole, both Republicans who were running for President in the 73rd year of their life.

And, as they’d say: They’re not getting any younger.

As much as the politics of Washington, D.C., seem to be a livestream rest home for angry white men, the “old” men argument is getting old as a refrain.

Not that I wouldn’t like to see someone, say, south of Social Security eligibility run to represent the nation. And not like I don’t scream every time America’s great-grandfather, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, talks about running for re-election, which will put him close to 100, if he makes it.

There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the choices for president. And there are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with both Biden and Trump — they both have vulnerabilities. And while seeing Trump on the ballot for a third time in a row is exasperating in the era of very short attention spans, such appearances are hardly rare in the history of American presidential elections.

And if you look closely at presidential elections, the “old man” argument doesn’t hold up so well.

On a snowy Montana afternoon, I had a snoot full of pundits telling me that both men were just too damn old to run for office. And, as much as I tend to agree with that statement, I stopped: OK, so then what? Telling us that both men are ancient or suffering from the typical cognitive decline of elderly men is a statement of fact, but lacks any kind of context.

If we want to talk about our presidential choices for 2024, great — let’s have it. We could talk about spending, immigration, civil liberties, public education, Russia, Israel or climate change. Those are all topics worth talking about, but I am not sure the age argument holds up so well.

Chronologically speaking, Biden and Trump are the two oldest major party candidates to ever run. That’s a fact, and much has been made of that.

But age, as they’d say, is relative. And relative to presidential races, Biden and Trump are old, but not shockingly so.

I did the math.

The actual age of any human is fairly insignificant. To make that number meaningful, you have to look around. The life expectancy of many minority groups and women has historically been a lot worse than the affluent white men who usually get elected to the presidency. Also, a footnote to the math is really one of science as well. Life expectancy is a key measurement that has to be considered in this conversation: If humans lived to 200 years old, 82 may not seem so old. And this is where it gets tricky.

Determining life expectancy before 1900 is complicated by a number of data challenges: The relatively poor comprehensive record-keeping makes it difficult to say with certainty what the life expectancy really was, except for the same kind of white, upper class male — and even then, there wasn’t the CDC or the Census Bureau keeping tight records and statistical models. In 1900, the life expectancy was around 51 years old. That’s when we start having reliable, more certain records. Surely, it varied before then — in some of the estimates out there, the American life expectancy dipped in the middle part of the century due to the devastating impact of the Civil War.

And let’s not even get started about mortality in childbirth, where some deaths weren’t even recorded, which tends to throw the numbers sideways. So, using a constant of life expectancy of 50 until 1900 when better statistics become available, it’s easy to see that many of the people we elected as president and those who ran against them were old relative to the population.

Comparing the ages of the candidates relative to life expectancy shows a number of interesting trends, a few of which I’ll mention:

• If you’re looking for match-up of old men, take the 1848 Presidential election between Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass (not exactly a memorable one, right?). Taylor was 64 and Cass was 66, each more than a dozen years past the average life expectancy. As a reference point, Biden is nine years and Trump is five beyond the estimated current American life expectancy.
• Beyond Franklin Delano Roosevelt running for President in four consecutive terms, Trump’s third shot at the office is hardly unique. John Quincy Adams ran three times (also won once). Andrew Jackson ran three times. Grover Cleveland ran three times, winning twice, but not consecutively. And William Jennings Bryan ran three times and lost all of them. Richard Nixon also ran for president three times.
• George Washington was the first person in his 60s to run for president, being 60 when he entered his second term in office in 1792. The first person to run for president in their 70s was Ronald Reagan, who was 73 in 1984. And Biden is the only person to run in his 80s.
• The youngest person to run for office was William Jennings Bryan who was just 36 when he ran in 1896, losing to Republican William McKinley. The youngest person to win the presidency was John F. Kennedy in 1960 at the age of 43. The next youngest was Bill Clinton at 46 in 1992; and Theodore Roosevelt who won at 46, but had been a sitting president at that time since age 42 (when McKinley was assassinated).
• Until the 2020 election, the average ages of the recent presidential candidates was below — sometimes significantly below — the American life expectancy, meaning the trend was younger candidates. Before the first Trump-Biden race, you’d have to look to the 1920 race between Warren Harding and Democrat James Cox to find candidates who were old relative to the rest of the electorate.

So, let’s have those debates and talk about the candidates, but when it comes to age, it’s hardly much different than many other elections.