ROCHESTER, New Hampshire — Top supporters of Bernie Sanders lovingly made the age of the oldest candidate in the 2020 race the punchline to their jokes.
“Our senator may be 78, but baby, we’re about to make him 46,” Nina Turner, co-chairwoman of the Sanders campaign and former Ohio state senator, said in an introduction speech Saturday, referring to making the Vermont senator as the 46th president.
“Young voters want Bernie because he’s fighting for their future,” filmmaker and activist Michael Moore told the crowd of 1,100 in a drafty opera house. “With all due respect to the senator, he’s not fighting for his future. He’s in his future!”
New Hampshire Sanders campaign co-chairwoman Mindi Messmer, a former state representative, described a surprising scene at a Manchester airport diner the previous night.
“We sat down, and my back was to a group of young people who all of a sudden started screaming, there was a big commotion going on,” she said. “I thought Justin Bieber or somebody like that was in there. It was Bernie Sanders.”
Sanders, one of four septuagenarian Democratic presidential hopefuls, would be the oldest president ever elected. Ronald Reagan, the current record-holder, was a few weeks shy of 78 when he left office in 1989.
Attention on Sanders’s age intensified in October when he suffered a heart attack and had to cancel events and took a few weeks away from the campaign trail. Many early state voters say that they would prefer a younger candidate.
Some of Sanders’s supporters brush off concerns about his age, pointing to the same socialist message he’s espoused over nearly four decades in public office.
“He’s been so consistent his whole career, always fighting for the underdog, and he’s just genuine,” said Nicki King, a 34-year-old graduate student from Stratham, New Hampshire.
Others, though, think questions about his age are unavoidable.
“I feel like he could get one term,” said Amana Rotimi, a 21-year-old college senior at Rhode Island College who attended Sanders’s Rochester event. “With his heart attack, I was really concerned about his health and how long he be able to physically be in office. I think he said really think hard about who he can pick for VP.”
Student Alexis Raporza, 26, made a similar point.
“I don’t know if a second term is really feasible at that point,” Raporza said. “I’m concerned that people are going to see that he’s, like, breaking promises that he’s made.”
