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--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Twenty, Twenty Explained. Twenty, Twenty Explained.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Andrew Prokop, Vox, six states held primaries yesterday. What are we calling this Tuesday?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Some have called it Super Tuesday, too. I've also seen it referred to as Big Tuesday, Mini Tuesday. Too Fast Tuesday.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Oh, it's a sad situation. I mean, next time around, Democrats really have to get it together and come up with better names for some of these non-super days.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So what's our big takeaway from what happened last night?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It was a very bad night for Bernie Sanders and his chances of winning the nomination.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This was the first actual voting day where we were down to two candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Biden had clearly gained the advantage on Super Tuesday, but now it was a two-way contest.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Sanders needed to really change the dynamics of the race.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And he very much did not do that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He got utterly blown out in Mississippi and Missouri, lost pretty strongly in Michigan as well, a state he has affection for because he pulled off a surprising upset victory against Hillary Clinton there in 2016.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He also even lost Idaho, which is a white rural state and showcases some of the differences in Bernie's coalition this time around.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Was there any good news for Bernie last night?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Not really.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He won the North Dakota caucuses, but that is a very small state.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And the actual margin of victory means that he will probably net about two delegates there.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So it's not going to help him in the delegate count.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Then there's Washington state. We don't have a call yet as of the time of this recording.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But currently, it looks like Biden and Bernie are about tied.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that would really be a blow to Bernie in terms of the delegate count.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: To be even in Washington state, which was his single best state in terms of delegates last time, is just a huge defeat for him and calls into question how he is ever going to be able to turn this thing around going forward.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So let's focus on Michigan for a second, because that's a state where Bernie surprisingly won in 2016 and lost pretty handily this time around to Biden.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How did Biden pull off this victory there?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think it is a similar story that we've seen in Michigan and across the country, really.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Once the field winnowed to two candidates, a clear majority of Democratic voters almost everywhere are supporting Joe Biden at this point.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that is what happened in Michigan.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Bernie beat Hillary there quite narrowly. It was about by one percentage point in 2016.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So even then, Michigan was more important in terms of the media narrative.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Bernie pulled off this comeback.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He got a lot of attention for it and people said, oh, maybe this thing isn't over yet.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Not only did he not achieve that, but he lost big.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He was down by about 15 percentage points at the last count that I have seen.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that bodes ill for Bernie in other northern and midwestern states, particularly with significant black proportion of the electorate.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But he has performed more weakly among working class white voters as well.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I wonder also with Michigan, you know, Bernie beat Hillary and then lost to Biden.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And those two seem pretty similar in a lot of ways.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How much do you think that can be chalked up to sexism?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yeah, I mean, this is something that I hope is studied pretty closely.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There seem to be some pretty powerful arguments, you know, because when trying to find out why a certain politician lost, it is helpful to have a situation that is quite similar in many respects because there are always many different factors that go into each race.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So when you have Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden largely agree on most substantive issues, they're both establishment figures.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They were both running against Bernie Sanders and they both hope to run against Donald Trump in the general election.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Of course, there are differences as well this time around.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But, you know, when I look at it just intuitively, I do wonder if there was a large chunk of the Democratic electorate who sort of instinctively felt Joe Biden, he's a good guy.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Hillary Clinton something about her that I don't like.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And whether you put that down to unique factors of their political history or due to sexism, I think there are strong arguments on both sides.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And you've got to wonder about what is unfolding here.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Bernie Sanders actually gave a speech today about his campaign.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Today, I say to the Democratic establishment, in order to win in the future, you need to win the voters who represent the future of our country.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And you must speak to the issues of concern to them.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: For a second there, I thought he might actually drop out, but I guess he doubled down.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So Bernie opened the speech by saying that the most important thing is to beat Donald Trump in November.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In my view, he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious bigot.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And he must be defeated.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I will do everything in my power to make that happen.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Then he moved on to say that Tuesday's results were a bad night for him in terms of delegate math.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He tried to point out a few bright spots, including his win in North Dakota being about even in Washington.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And more broadly, he said that Democratic voters were embracing his agenda as seen in exit polls.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And he pointed to his success among young voters.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We are winning the generational debate.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: While Joe Biden continues to do very well with older Americans, especially those people over 65, our campaign continues to win the vast majority of the votes of younger people.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If he's winning so many young people over, why is he losing so badly overall?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Bernie's theory of how he would reshape the electorate has hinged on mobilizing great numbers of people who don't ordinarily vote to turn out to the polls.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that simply has not happened and certainly not happened in terms of young voters so far in the primaries and caucuses this year.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I saw one estimate that the median age of the Democratic voter this year has been 56 years old.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that just goes to show that most Democratic voters are older.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And if Bernie is getting blown out among older voters, as he is, then winning big among young voters doesn't really do much to counteract that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So why is he staying in?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So Bernie said he is looking forward to his first one-on-one debate against Joe Biden on Sunday night.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And let me be very frank as to the questions that I will be asking Joe.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Joe, what are you going to do for the 500,000 people who go bankrupt in our country because of medically related debt?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And what are you going to do for the working people of this country and small business people who are paying on average 20 percent of their incomes for health care?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: As far as Bernie's larger strategic thinking, it is extremely unlikely at this point that Sanders will manage to make a comeback.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Basically, he'd have to win about 57 percent of pledged delegates remaining to pass Biden.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that is very unlikely.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But it is not impossible.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If this race, which has been volatile in the past, were to turn back in Bernie's favor, if Bernie surged to, say, a 10-point lead in national polls, it's entirely plausible that he could end up winning about 57 percent of delegates going forward.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The problem is that the trends are all going in the wrong direction for Bernie at this point.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And there's little reason, it seems, that if things continue as they are, to believe that he will be able to pull off that comeback.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So you think next Tuesday, March 17th, could be decision time for the Bernie campaign?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yeah, I obviously have no idea what Bernie will decide.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's a very personal decision, but he's certainly going to have to think very hard about the best way forward for his ideas and his own influence.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that best way forward may not be staying in the race to just lose big to Joe Biden everywhere.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden clearly have a lot of differences.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But they do have one thing in common.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They'd each be the oldest president ever elected.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that might be a problem.
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--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: 2020. 2020.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Derek Thompson, The Atlantic.
--:-- Derek Thompson: We still don't know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, but we do know that whoever wins is going to be pretty old.
--:-- Derek Thompson: At the very least, we know that our next president is going to be over 70.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Is that unusual?
--:-- Derek Thompson: It's extremely unusual.
--:-- Derek Thompson: We are looking at an election in November where no matter who wins the election, the person giving the inaugural address in January will be the oldest president ever delivering an inaugural address.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And I think this is a problem.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So is this a new problem or has it been around for a while?
--:-- Derek Thompson: This is a relatively new thing in terms of just the extraordinary oldness of the contest.
--:-- Derek Thompson: At the same time, though, I think it clicks into a lot of geriatrics that exist in American power today.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Congress is just about older than it's ever been.
--:-- Derek Thompson: If you look at the House Speaker, the House Whip, the Senate Majority Leader, they are all older than 75.
--:-- Derek Thompson: You find when you look across the corporate world that new CEOs are getting older.
--:-- Derek Thompson: You look across the science world, you see that Nobel Prize winners are getting older.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So it seems like power across disciplines, political, corporate, scientific, power is getting older.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And as a result, that intersection between oldness and power, between what you might call gerontocracy ruled by the old and plutocracy ruled by the moneyed, those are becoming intertwined.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And it's creating a scenario where, as I see it, there's a lot of negative facts about America that are the result of gerontocracy multiplied by plutocracy.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So do we have any idea why the change to gerontocracy?
--:-- Derek Thompson: So the way that I think about it is that there is a supply issue and a demand issue.
--:-- Derek Thompson: On the supply issue, you look at the pipeline of American leadership, and it's extremely old.
--:-- Derek Thompson: You look at the fact that most of the people who are ready to become president by dint of their political record, they tend to be in their 60s and 70s.
--:-- Derek Thompson: You can also look at the fact that campaigns are becoming more expensive.
--:-- Derek Thompson: It takes more money to win a presidential campaign.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And who has the money?
--:-- Derek Thompson: Well, it's old people.
--:-- Derek Thompson: It's not just the fact that older politicians have more money and they have more donor networks.
--:-- Derek Thompson: It's also that they are more willing to leave the private sector and spend a decade being president.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Look at someone like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
--:-- Derek Thompson: If they run for president and become president, that's 10 years of peak earnings power, peak productivity that they're cutting out of their life in order to live in the White House.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Look at Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg.
--:-- Derek Thompson: You know, what's their opportunity cost?
--:-- Derek Thompson: They're both in their 70s.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Their greatest achievements in the private sector are behind them.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Like, what else are they going to do with their 80s except spend money on political and national causes that are meaningful to them?
--:-- Derek Thompson: So in a variety of ways, I think the supply of leadership is trending toward oldness.
--:-- Derek Thompson: What about the other side of the equation, which is demand about voters' preferences?
--:-- Derek Thompson: Do voters prefer older candidates?
--:-- Derek Thompson: Yeah, on the demand side, it's pretty simple.
--:-- Derek Thompson: The American electorate is getting older.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Americans overall are on average older than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Older people tend to vote for older people.
--:-- Derek Thompson: A finding of political science is that voters tend to like candidates that are somewhat their age.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So when you add it all up, you know, older voters preferring older candidates, you're going to have an older sort of batch of leadership.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Is this just an American thing?
--:-- Derek Thompson: I mean, Europe's got a bunch of young politicians and they must have a lot of old people too.
--:-- Derek Thompson: What's really interesting about Europe is that even though Europe is getting older faster than America, it turns out that the average age of European Union leaders has actually declined in the last 30 years.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And what you look across the leadership at Macron or Trudeau or Johnson and other OECD countries, they tend to be younger than 60.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Boris Johnson, for example, the prime minister of the UK, is, quote, only 55, even though in the UK, old people outvote young people by a really wide margin.
--:-- Derek Thompson: In fact, Biden, Sanders and Trump are all older right now than any of the UK's five previous prime ministers today, going back to Tony Blair.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So the U.S. election is really extraordinarily old.
--:-- Derek Thompson: You know, you say that in France and Canada, maybe they have an aging population, but not aging candidates.
--:-- Derek Thompson: I wonder if when we look at America and we have Mayor Pete, whose base was largely old white people and Bernie, whose base is clearly young people.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Are they exceptions that prove the rule or are they just maybe showing that America could be headed in a different direction?
--:-- Derek Thompson: Bernie and Pete are fascinating exceptions because in many ways, they are mirrors of the exact same phenomenon.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Both of them are relatively popular politicians who are deeply disliked among their own age group.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Bernie Sanders' weakest age group is people over 65, which he clearly is.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And Pete Buttigieg's weakest demographic was people under 40, which he clearly is.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And I've thought a lot about why they might be strangely offensive to people that are their same age, given the political science finding that typically voters like people that are their age.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And I think in both cases, it's the same two things.
--:-- Derek Thompson: First, it's about ideology.
--:-- Derek Thompson: The younger American Democratic cohort is pretty far to the left of the median American voter.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And Pete Buttigieg was trying to be the median American voter.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So in a way he was a traitor to his generational identity.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Bernie Sanders in many ways is the same thing.
--:-- Derek Thompson: He comes from a generation that fought the Cold War.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And meanwhile here he is with all of these video clips saying, yes, the Soviets do this bad and the Cubans do this bad, but let's praise certain elements of their socialist policy.
--:-- Derek Thompson: But in addition to these ideological differences, There's also something personal.
--:-- Derek Thompson: When I talk to older people, like, say, my grandmother and her friends in Michigan, and I ask them, Democratic voters, lifelong Democratic voters, why don't you like Bernie Sanders?
--:-- Derek Thompson: It's the same answer every single time.
--:-- Derek Thompson: They don't like the way he presents himself.
--:-- Derek Thompson: They hate the shouting.
--:-- Derek Thompson: They hate the hair.
--:-- Derek Thompson: They hate the flying wrists.
--:-- Derek Thompson: They hate it all.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And it's actually really similar when you sort of put that up next to the reason why young people don't like Pete Buttigieg.
--:-- Derek Thompson: They want more, like, flying wrists?
--:-- Derek Thompson: They want more flagged risk.
--:-- Derek Thompson: They want Pete to do what Bernie does.
--:-- Derek Thompson: When Bernie shouts, old people think he's shouting at them and young people think he's shouting at power.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Shouting with them.
--:-- Derek Thompson: He is their surrogate shouter.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And Pete Buttigieg was never the surrogate shouter.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Pete Buttigieg was always the 37, 38 year old who looked like he was doing a emulation of someone who was 55 and had been a senator for 30 years.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Or someone who had been president for eight years from Chicago.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Exactly.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So I guess unless you are, you know, a generation trader, you know, going against stereotypes or ideologies of your generation, you're probably going to be liked by that generation of voters.
--:-- Derek Thompson: But if that does lead to a lot of old candidates, is that necessarily a bad thing?
--:-- Derek Thompson: Yeah, I don't want this argument to sound like ageism.
--:-- Derek Thompson: I don't want it to sound like anti-experience.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And I don't want it to sound like I think young people should just run more stuff by dint of their age.
--:-- Derek Thompson: At the same time, you know, to betray a thousand Hallmark cards, age is not just a number.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Rule by the old is not harmless.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And there's three reasons why it's not harmless.
--:-- Derek Thompson: First, gerontocracy is a cousin of plutocracy.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Because wealth is concentrated among the old, if you have a situation where older Americans are running everything from the corporate world to Congress and the Senate and the White House, that leads to a scenario where more policy is entrenched that helps old moneyed interests.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And that means that the vast majority of Americans are cut out.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Second, I think old governance can be bad governance because as Americans get older, it is more likely that they suffer some kind of cognitive decline.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Not all of them.
--:-- Derek Thompson: You have some people who could destroy you and me in a chess game and crossword puzzle right now.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And you also have some people who have early dementia, early Alzheimer's.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And as a result, because there's so much cognitive diversity among people in their 70s and 80s, it becomes more important, I think, to have testing available to determine the cognitive health of America's leaders if our leaders are going to have a median age of something like 75, 76.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And we don't have that right now.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And then number three, this is more of a philosophical point, but I think the most important problem in the world right now is climate change.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And climate change is the sort of problem that is going to be felt most acutely by younger generations.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And if you have older people who are not necessarily going to experience the biggest problems of climate change, making decisions on behalf of the masses who will be experiencing this, I see that as an incentive problem.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And I think that government of the elderly, by the elderly, for the elderly is not the right way to establish a government to help younger interests, especially when the problems we face are in the future.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Okay, so assuming gerontocracy is a problem, are there solutions, wealth taxes, term limits?
--:-- Derek Thompson: I think that, you know, maybe higher taxes can help.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Maybe term limits can help.
--:-- Derek Thompson: But I also see clear downsides to those things as well.
--:-- Derek Thompson: A wealth tax, for example, is going to be, I think, really difficult to pass through a sort of moderate conservative government.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And that might be the wrong place to put America's political capital if we get a democratic president.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And then on term limits, you know, I want to be mindful of gerontocracy, but I also don't want to be anti-experience.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And I think that, you know, one of the side effects of term limits is that term limits are a really clear tax on experience.
--:-- Derek Thompson: I wonder, you know, what you make of the fact that the two most successful leftist candidates who were both super popular among young people were 70 plus.
--:-- Derek Thompson: I mean, if a Bernie voter hears a conversation like this and they're like, well, Bernie's the guy who is really radical on climate change and radical on taxes and health care.
--:-- Derek Thompson: I mean, who cares that he's old?
--:-- Derek Thompson: Nobody should vote or not vote for any candidate because that candidate's age.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Full stop.
--:-- Derek Thompson: But also when you broaden the lens and look at American government, you have an American government that is older than it's ever been.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And that might be a problem.
--:-- Derek Thompson: So both parties need to do a much better job at building their pipeline, building their bench of political leadership in not just their 60s and 70s, but their 30s through 50s as well.
--:-- Derek Thompson: And I think any country that has a menu of viable presidents where every choice in the menu is older than 70 has a problem.
--:-- Derek Thompson: It has a political pipeline problem and it has an electoral problem.
--:-- Derek Thompson: That said, I think that problem clearly isn't going to be fixed in 2020, because no matter what, we are certainly going to elect a president who, by January, will be the oldest president ever delivering an inaugural address.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I'm Noam Hassenfeld, filling in for Sean Ramos for him while he's on vacation.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: This is Today Explained.
