The Effects of Candidate Age in the 2008 Presidential Election

When 71-year-old Senator John McCain had nearly secured enough delegates to lock up the Republican nomination, 46-year-old Senator Barack Obama, who was in a battle for the Democratic nomination against then-Senator Hillary Clinton, told a crowd in Virginia, "This week--this week, we found out that the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party will be Senator John McCain. Now, I believe John McCain is a good man and he is a genuine American hero. And we honor his half century of service to this nation" (CNN 2008). The compliment masked an attack. Cloaked as praise was a reminder of his longevity. McCain's age had been a target by other opponents as well. "[I]f John takes over the presidency at 72 and he ages three to one, how old will he be in four years? He'll be eighty-four," observed Mike Huckabee supporter and actor Chuck Norris in January 2008 (Fox News 2008). In this study, we investigate the extent to which the public believed that McCain was "too old to be president" as well as the belief that Obama was "too young" using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES). We also examine the influence of these beliefs on candidate evaluations and vote preference. Our results indicate that more people believed that McCain was "too old" to be president than believed that Obama was "too young." Trends from March 2008 to election day show that the percentage of people concerned about McCain's age increased over time, while the percentage worried about Obama's youth decreased. These beliefs were significantly associated with party identification, such that major party identifiers were more likely to believe that a candidate's age was problematic if the candidate belonged to the other party. Newspaper exposure and reading information about the presidential campaign on the Internet were significantly associated with believing that age disqualified McCain from the presidency. Candidate age perceptions were significantly associated with candidate favorability ratings and vote preference, even when party identification and a host of other sociodemographic characteristics were controlled. McCain's Age Questioned Age stereotyping is a pervasive part of contemporary culture. The literature is replete with studies demonstrating that age discrimination and other manifestations of ageism are common in many domains (e.g., Hedge and Borman 2006; Myers 2007; Nelson 2005). Riding on the back of ageism are assumptions that aging is a process of progressive decline and that being a septuagenarian signals senility. In 2007, Gallup hinted at the ways in which age might play out in 2008. When asked to assess various characteristics of a presidential candidate, roughly one in two reported that being "70 years of age or older" was undesirable (Carroll 2007). McCain, of course, was not the first presidential candidate to have his age translated into an indictment. Republican nominee Bob Dole, the only nominee to run at an age more advanced than McCain's, faced such questions and, with them, insinuations of incompetence in 1996 in his contest against Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton. Abrams and Brody (1998) observe that news articles about Dole frequently mentioned his age. Also problematic for McCain was the fact that the media focused more on his age than on Obama's. When Obama's experience was challenged during the presidential primaries by his Democratic rivals, especially Senator Hillary Clinton, the indictments did not include slurs about his youth. As he was 46 years old during the Democratic primaries and 47 years old during the general election, he was not only more than a decade older than the constitutional minimum requirement to assume the presidency, but also older than a number of previous holders of the nation's highest office. By contrast, McCain turned 72 just before the beginning of the general election campaign, meaning that, if elected, he would have been the oldest person ever to assume the presidency in the history of the country. …