One of the asymmetries in the races for the two parties’ presidential nominations is generational. The Democratic field of candidates tends to be relatively old, the Republican field relatively young. The following table shows the names of the candidates born in each year from 1941 to 1971.
The average birth year for the Democrats is 1950, just four years later than the 1946 birth years of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and 11 years earlier than the 1961 birth year (in Hawaii) of Barack Obama. Three men currently mentioned as possible additional candidates — Joe Biden (1942), John Kerry (1943), Al Gore (1948) — have birth years even earlier than that average. The average birth year for the Republican candidates is 1957. But only one, Rick Santorum, was born about that time. Otherwise you have a Republican generation gap, between 10 candidates born between 1945 and 1955 and six candidates born between 1962 and 1971.
Does all of this have any political significance? Primarily, I think, it shows that the Democratic party hasn’t been generating many plausible national candidates in recent years. Part of this may be institutional: Ambitious young people interested in politics and government tend to head to the Executive Branch when their party holds the White House, as Democrats have for 15 of the last 23 years, while such people in the other party tend to run for electoral office. The other part of the reason, and probably not totally unrelated, is that Democrats just haven’t done very well in elections below the presidential level in recent years.
There’s an interesting contrast here with the election of 1960, when the leading candidates — John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson for the Democrats; Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater for the Republicans — were in their 40s or early 50s. The oldest, Johnson and Rockefeller, were born in 1908 and turned 52 in the election year.
