If he beat President Trump, Bernie Sanders would be a year-and-a-half older on Inauguration Day than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president, was on his last day in office. At 78 years old, the Vermont senator is now the same age as the nation’s average male life expectancy, and he’s already suffered from a heart attack, the medical details of which he curiously refuses to disclose.

Just as with Joe Biden, if he were a run-of-the-mill candidate, voters simply would not accept Sanders’s advanced age for the presidency. This is his last shot at the White House, but given his equivocating responses to attacks levied at him by the standard bearers of the Democratic Party, it’s not clear that Sanders realizes this.