Senate: 1 Term. 6 years. Not able to then serve in the House. House: 2 Terms. 4 years. Not able to then serve in the Senate. 1 Term House + 1 Term Senate. 8 years total.

Elect any LEGAL Citizen regardless of age.

Lobbyists run everything because the politicians are all too new. It also completely disincentivizes long-term thinking because the system guarantees they will be out of office by the time the chickens come home to roost.

I think that's kind of bogus. If you can't figure out how to be an effective politician in your first term then you don't deserve to be elected for a second!

The problem here wouldn't even be solved by term limits, because Joe Biden has only been president for <4 years. The problem is that he has started to rapidly decline. Unless you institute some kind of Logan's Run Rule, you can't avoid elderly people in positions of power.

The actual, less fun solution, is for the party apparati to start elevating younger people to positions of power and influence. And that only happens if the members of that party start to demand it. It worked on Joe Biden, and he stepped aside.

A whole generation is unwilling to acknowledge their mortality, step aside and make room (although unlike politicians many aren’t because they can’t afford to)

That can't stop an elderly candidate from running third party to spite the eligibility rules, but that's already the case.

In California, we run an Open Primary system for every partisan office outside the POTUS so parties can’t even guarantee they’ll get a candidate into the general election even if they are otherwise eligible to put nominees forward and sometimes it’s Democrat vs Democrat (this has been happening for US Senate elections) or in some legislative districts Republican vs Republican.

Then coming from the opposite direction, you had a complete outsider in Trump effectively takeover the Republican Party in 2016 and he’s still holding the reins in 2024. Bernie Sanders almost managed something similar with the Democratic Party and they just barely held strong enough to keep that from happening. Twice.

Frankly political parties are incredibly unlikely to come together to impose any restrictions that would impose any kind of extra burden on their elder members, let alone age-gate them.

Either way, neither of them should have gotten as far as they did.

"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"

Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.

Unless you overhaul the way government workers earn retirement, or we decide that it's safe to employ older air traffic controllers, any other choice would be highly exploitative.

Their ability to collectively bargain effectively. It doesn’t matter how good their current compensation is - they aren’t getting the fair market rate without the ability to bargain as a union. Its an example of government and corporate interests colluding to suppress labor wages.

Having worked in the White House, this is 110% wrong. The Presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job. The cognitive demands and the and physical toll it takes on you is tremendous.

It's measurable biological certainty that reaction times as measured in milliseconds and fine motor control degrade with age. Vision and hearing also degrade. The nature of hands on control of flying a plane means there are no ways to compensate for this.

None of this applies to a politician making decision in a time span of hours, days or months and who can delegate tasks as they wish.

Yet Biden (and for some reason not Trump, who's well documented to have the same kind of senior moments but they rarely make it to the news) is raked over the coals for them all the same. Why do we ask the president to be able to walk a stairs, remember pointless ceremony, and all the other things that have nothing to do with performance in office (on which there has been next to zero discussion this cycle)?

I can see that age is a risk factor you don't want for a commander in chief, anymore than you want it in fighter pilots. If so, age limits seem reasonable.

Airline pilots have a mandatory retirement age based on health and safety studies associated with the risks and requirements of flying a plane.

Girl scout age requirements, as you might imagine, aren't based on the same criteria.

the president has entire staffs, including highly qualified generals, bureaucrats, line workers, etc. to drive the ship.

These go hand in hand: our current voting system breaks down if multiple candidates draw votes from each other, but a better voting system would be immune to that failure mode and could give people a free choice of several reasonable candidates without having some of them withdraw and throw their support to others.

why is it that there are not the best 5, 50 or 500 people on the ballot and I as a voter can mark any and all that I think I know will do the job the way I want them to

"Check the box next to anyone you approve of" is not hard to figure out.

"Write down the candidates you find acceptable, in order of preference" is not substantially harder, either, and provides additional benefit (the ability to express a preference among the candidates you approve of).

I am concerned tho that preference voting (is that the right word?) gives people too many opportunities to screw up—there are too many things that can go wrong on the ballot (ones I've seen have three columns for 1st, 2nd, 3rd preference, and there should be at most? exactly? one mark in each column). Also vote counting has too many ifs and whens and seemingly arbitrary rules how my ballot will be counted in case my 1st choice doesn't clearly make it on first count.

Writing down candidates names will make for some fun days when it comes to counting. Plus, what if multiple candidates have similar names? And, a ballot with a scribbled "Miller!!1!" on it, do you mean Ms Annie Miller from Portland Oregon? That one? Lastly, when was the last time another person was able to read your scratches?

Here in Australia you number the box next to the candidates name from 1 to N this is not normally an issue for the local seat in the lower chamber (house of representatives) where there are a manageable number of candidates, but in the upper chamber where senators are elected on a state wide basis you end up with sometimes farcical situations like the infamous "tablecloth ballot paper" which had 264 candidates.

There has been some attempt to reform this such as forcing people/party's to pay a registration fee in order to appear on the ballot (this is done to cut down on so called nuisance candidates but it is arguably undemocratic, although I believe you are eligible for a refund of the fee if you poll above some threshold % of votes which is a fair compromise in my opinion).

It's not enough (£500 currently) to be a meaningful expense to any candidate actually trying to win, but it's enough friction for 'fun' campaigns that we get enough to be funny but not enough to really interfere with anything.

And, yeah, ours is called a deposit because if you get 5% of the vote you get it back - and the phrase "lost their deposit" to reference a candidate who thought they were real utterly cratering on election day is pretty widely known.

Of course the UK's system of government is largely a patchwork of oddities that, put together, mostly work for us, so how well any particular oddity will work in another system is invariably debatable.

Given especially US multi-race ballots, I find it a lot harder to see the incremental complexity of approval voting having a noticeable effect (though note for calibration that there's plenty of criticism out there for how confusing many multi-race ballots are as is).

You could list the candidates in random order with a number next to them, and then have people write down those numbers in order. That, like anything else, would have failure modes, though.

An NxN matrix for N candidates allows using "marked or not" detection, but it creates a huge ballot even with just a handful of candidates.

Dowdall's method assigns 1, 1⁄2, 1⁄3... points to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd... candidates on each ballot, then elects the candidate with the most points. Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted, which gives each one very different properties.

Ranked voting systems are usually contrasted with rated voting methods, which allow voters to indicate how strongly they support different candidates (e.g. on a scale from 0-10).[1] Rated voting systems use more information than ordinal ballots; as a result, they are not subject to many of the problems with ranked voting (including results like Arrow's theorem).

That's a bucket full of problems. I remember that I had a similar problems years ago when I wanted to consolidate several lists about the "daily usefulness" of Chinese characters. How much does it weigh when you put A, B, C in that order? is A=1/1, B=1/2, C=1/3? or maybe A=0, B=-1, C=-2? To quote the above, "Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted". This should be a red flag! I'm happy to see that alternatives to first-past-post are tried out in some locations such as Alaska, Maine and Australia, but why ranked voting?

Ranked voting is only good when you think of yourself as a sole, lonely voter. You put the candidates into this order: A, B, C. But there will be other voters with other preferences. Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD. Now you have three favorites A, E, F that are preferred choices, and there's that also-ran B who only was second best. But B got three second-best votes whereas each of A, E, F only got one vote.

So answer my question: how many second, third, fourth votes will it take to surpass a given number of first votes? If there's another ballot in the same election with GCBD on it, now you have B with 3x2nd and 1x3rd place. You cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide these numbers. There's no clear answer (although practical procedures can and have been proposed and used) and that bugs me. The entire thing looks like a game of Bridge, Skat or Poker to me, full of justifiable but ultimately very arbitrary rules, hard to explain and tricky to get right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method says that much to me. One also has to account for unranked candidates and decide whether it should be possible to give one rank to several candidates, and then whether (as done in sports) the next rank must be left empty.

It just goes on and on, the list of options to do the ballot and to do the counting is truly mind boggling. This is the reason I've come to much prefer preference voting over ranked voting. Ranked voting is much too complicated for general use in a general election whereas preference voting is simple and clear and the number of "design choices" as it were is drastically reduced when compared to ranked voting.

The ordinary case of preference voting is extremely explainable: if more people prefer A to B than prefer B to A, A beats B; pick the candidate that beats everyone else. "It's like running a bunch of head-to-head elections all at once."

They're also really easy to tally into a table: "A ranked above B" is a point for A over B; "B ranked above A" is a point for B over A; A and B ranked equal relative to each other doesn't add anything to either of those two cells.

The corner cases like cycles almost never come up. And even then, it's relatively easy to explain a high-level understanding of the most common methods: "if there's a loop of people who each beat the next one in the loop, ignore the one with the smallest margin of victory". If A beats B in a landslide, B beats C in a landslide, and C very narrowly beats A, A wins.

Also:

> Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD.

Every ballot implicitly ranks every option, and the usual assumption is that if someone doesn't even care enough to list a candidate, they prefer every candidate they did list over any candidate they didn't list. (There are UX design ideas that could let someone say "this candidate is last" without ordering every candidate, but that adds complexity.) So these ballots are:

    A > B > C > D > E = F
    E > B > C > D > A = F
    F > B > C > D > A = E

In models that ignore some of people's preferences, voting "1 Preferred, 2 Lesser Evil, 3 Greater Evil" is dangerous, because your preference for Lesser Evil over Greater Evil is ignored. This creates an incentive for people to keep voting the way they do now, with the compromise candidate on the top.

Approval makes sense because it's easy to explain. Condorcet makes sense because it's relatively close to ideal at the cost of making it slightly more complex to vote. Any model of the form "Ranked choice, but ignore some of the preferences" is the worst of both worlds: more complex to vote, but doesn't produce as good of an outcome.

All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support. They're not going to overhaul the voting system when they can't agree on the national vote even mattering.

It ignores preferences below the top 2, just like the current system ignores preferences below the top 1. It's probably an improvement, but the minor advantage in ballot design doesn't seem worth rolling out a half-measure.

> but it's quite clear in practice that any ranked choice voting system has to have a limit on how many choices you can express

In practice, 99% of ballots will only include the candidates listed on the ballot. Perhaps set a limit of N write-in candidates for some reasonable N, to avoid someone playing edge-case games like "you are legally obligated to count my ballot containing 200 million names!!!1!". But there's no obvious reason not to allow as many rankings as candidates on the ballot plus number of permitted write-ins.

> All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support.

There's widespread opposition from the party that regularly loses the popular vote. I do hope it passes someday, though; it'll be a first step towards serious voting reform.

The distinguishing and necessary result of democracy, practically unique when compared to any other form of government, is that it provides a nonviolent means to remove aggressively incompetent people from office.

    > Sadly, this has never
    > happened, anywhere, ever.

If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today.

However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted, it ultimately comes down to an assessment of what candidate voters would have been willing to back.

My point includes the suggestion that there is never a "best"; the optimal outcome is to elect the least worst candidate.

    ALI: I shall stay here and learn politics.
    LAWRENCE: That's a very low occupation.
    ALI: I had no thought of it when I met you.

c.f. also Adams on presidential elections, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416

I've actually had a few runins in my past with some US senators where I got to actually sit and listen and converse about some problems. I was always unimpressed with the caliber of the man, to be honest, in terms of both their emotional and cognitive prowess. Having random people vote on the issues probably wouldn't yield worse results.

Something I've come to believe is that US democracy doesn't naturally select for anyone based on leadership skills, credentials, or any virtue that is needed in such a role. It seems to select for people who can get votes, which can mean a lot of things. I think that is a key issue.

Me neither, but it reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke novel "Songs from Distant Earth". In it, a distant colony of Earth has a very small population, since the planet is all a big ocean, except for a few small islands. The small society has a mayor, who's randomly chosen from the population for a limited term. The only disqualification (other than obvious things like age) is that the post can't go to someone who actually wants to do the job. It's similar to how no one in their right mind actually wants to sit on a jury, but people do it because of civic duty.

Despite what the law says, people in the administration don't actually have to follow the orders of their appointed superior. If they feel that the senator/congressman/president/etc can be fooled, or simply that enough of their colleagues are on their side, they can just ignore even direct orders. What's the senator going to do? Call the police because their subordinates are ignoring them?

So one of the most necessary qualities in an official is being able to control the levers of power - through connections, charisma, physical power in ages past, money - whatever it is, you need your subordinates to actually do what you tell them. Government isn't a boardgames where people follow the law just because those are the rules of the game.

No, this didn't happen at all. There has been no election yet, and polls are not elections, they're just random-ish samplings. The polls showed voters weren't very enthusiastic about Biden, but back in 2015, the polls showed that Trump was absolutely certain to lose in a landslide to Hillary, and that didn't happen. I do agree with the poll results this time around, but that's just my opinion and not at all backed up by an actual election, which we now won't have (since the election will have a different candidate). We'll see how well the new candidate fares.

>However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted

This "mechanism" was not part of the government at all, and not really part of "democracy". It was just a bunch of opinion polls organized by mostly the press, and they influenced Biden to stop his campaign, but again this is not some central feature of democratic systems at all. The only way of truly assessing what candidate voters choose is to have an election. Everything else is just guesswork.

Since that is the only thing that has enabled Republicans to barely win presidential elections since 2000, we will not get anywhere close to passing such legislation, let alone get it approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures.

As a side note, the last attempted constitutional amendment was the Equal Right Amendment, giving equal rights to women. It was proposed in 1972, and is maybe close to finally being approved.

https://www.equalrightsamendment.org

Say huh? It is literally the same thing as now but in reverse and much much worse. At least now your vote has a chance of counting for something if only influencing your elector. If you live in a state that has agreed with the compact and has a small population, your vote doesn’t mean a damn thing even if you vote for the popular vote winner. Your vote is not yours, it’s the mob’s.

Oh and of course if you're for a small-state bonus in presidential (i.e. federal, nationwide) elections why is it that geography of all factors should be the one distinguishing point? How about skin color or profession? You as the artisanal baker that you are by vocation, don't you feel that artisanal bakers are always underrepresented in parliaments? Shouldn't your vote as an artisanal baker be given more weight, just like the way that citizens of New Hampshire get preferential treatment the Way God Intended?

If you don’t believe that geography and states is the correct framework we should use, go work to amend the constitution. Why “break it from the inside”? Go make your case and let your argument win on its merits and get the votes. Stop trying to game the system, go change the system.

In the current system, some people's votes, those of the least populous states, count for far, far more than some other people's votes (those in the most populous states).

Plus, today, if you live in a state that is overwhelmingly in favor of one party, your preference for the other party doesn't count in the slightest. If you're a blue Texan or a red New Yorker, there is 0 point to you even going to the polls. In a national voting system, your votes would truly matter as well.

It may feel nice if your state casts its votes for your preferred candidate even if they lose the general election. But it is absolutely 100% entirely irrelevant rationally. And this is the only thing lost if the law change goes through.

That's the point of the Electoral College. It weeds out groupthink, which is the downfall of direct democracy.

It's not stupid just because you refuse to use it right.

The real problem of the system is the state based system, where winning a narrow majority in a state is equivalent to winning a landslide, since you get the same amount of power. Also, the fact that different people get different leverage based on whether they live in a smaller or larger state is highly unfair.

The electors themselves have not actually decided an election in a hundred years or more (as in, electors deciding against the official choice of their state). While they legally could, I would bet you however much you want that they would get literally lynched, if not arrested and replaced, if they tried to. For all practical purposes, the USA has a weighted state-based popular vote system, where the president is the one who wins a majority in states with enough weight.

Edit: researching a little bit more, the electors have never changed the result of the presidential election. The closest they ever came was in 1836 when enough electors ignored their state's vote for vice-president, and still the VP who won the by-state popular vote got elected later in congress. The president was separate and won the electoral college per the popular vote as normal.

So, this concept that electors serve some purpose to safeguard democracy from populism is a pure fantasy. It may be a fantasy that the founders shared, but it has never panned out in reality.

It includes people who die at birth, childhood illnesses, etc.

Once you were past 20, your remaining life time jumped significantly

Turns out just having steady access to food, living a low stress lifestyle, and not having to wade through literal shit on the streets was all it took for some lucky ancient humans to have the same lifespans as modern humans.

Citation needed. That claim seems clouded by today's standard of living.

Before there was clean drinking water, alcohol was much more widely consumed. Were people demented, drunk, or experiencing alcoholic dementia?

Before OSHA, jobs could cause similar symptoms. "Mad as a hatter" referred to hat-makers commonly getting mercury poisoning, as one example of job-induced dementia.

Before the FDA, we have examples from food and medicine.

Etc.

Exactly. There's no point in putting an upper age limit on a position when no one lives long enough for age to even be a factor.

The US has suffered for the lack of information. How can this be addressed, in the next 20 years, is a much more interesting question.

So why can't I pick a candidate that is under 30, or born overseas?

The rules make no logical sense and need updating.

How primaries work is entirely up to the party. They may require votes, weigh some votes more than others, or whatever other scheme they choose internally.

Because age is no indication of fitness for any kind of activity or role. It sure would be nice, if persons with high responsibilities would periodically undergo a fitness test. I'd think the founding fathers saw the election process as such fitness test and the electoral college as the judge of fitness of the presidential candidate.

This is a generalization that overlooks the nuanced reality of human aging. Physical and cognitive functions become more pronounced in advanced age, such as above 70 or 80. Sure, age alone does not universally determine fitness for activities or roles, but it is a very important factor to consider. I am fine with fitness tests.

Do we live on different planets. Most young people are able, most people over 80 will have mobility and/or cognition issues.

So the Framers figured nobody on the cusp of senility would run, and if he did, he wouldn’t get the votes. Because both would be ridiculous.

Especially considering that the only democracy they envisioned was the House, since everybody else was to be picked by nondemocratic means (essentially then, by an aristocracy, who would surely be wise enough to make a good decision).

Credit where credit is due, it actually seemed obvious to Benjamin Franklin that such a thing was inevitable .. hence the need for close attention to the machinery of government and regularly updating the constitution.

See:

    I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well-administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, 

And as others mentioned, this is a bipartisan stance, so it's not a matter of political leanings. Old people represent most of our voter-base and thus most of our represenatives.

The Constitution was largely written as a departure from the monarchical British system. By not allowing presidential candidates younger than 35, this would prevent hereditary transmission of the presidency. Past 35, a candidate is more likely to stand on their own merits rather than their family or connections.

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-a-presidential-...

Here in ye olde Europe (and I believe the same for the U.S.), it is unfortunately common to see extremely young, as in literal college students, parliamentarians -- most of them handsome, well-spoken and opinionated; and some also coincidentally the children of famous politicians or businesspeople :-)

I.e., your statement is translated to "that large masses of possibly unqualified people choose wrongly qualified people as having power over other people, with important regard to people in their right mind". It is not a value; it is a concern tackled in systemic planning.

All governments, democratic or despotic can only govern with the consent of their subjects.

It's thus reasonable to dislike the precise mechanisms by which that consent (explicit and implied) is achieved in any particular country.

I'll have to look more into the 'seasoning' islands full of slaves in the Caribbean during the slave trade years. IIRC they were treated as bad as you can get, were the majority, and didn't consent yet practically didn't overthrow their dictator in most circumstances (Haiti might count as an exception).

while it is very much possible that an aged individual is mentally proficient.

That doesn’t mean no 80 year old is more mentally proficient than the average 60 year old, but we want more than average here.

So, no, decline is fully independent from state, just like a derivative, a trend, does not determine a value. There exist GDP growth of 15%/yr: they do not indicate a big GDP.

Nobody has greatly declined and is still among the best choices. I’d happily set the same standard at say 75-80 for Congress and Judges here, but Presidents need to be able to quickly deal with complex and novel issues. That’s exactly the kind of problems where age has the biggest impact.

Would that occasionally reject some still capable people? Yes, but there’s over 330 million people in the US, we can pre filter and still have plenty of options.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump, and Biden are all showing significant issues and they aren’t getting better over the next 4 years.

An old person may have accumulated tremendous valuable experience in their field but it is increasingly hard to start over in a new field.

This is even before our mind and health decays and some of us get to walk the earth as shadows of our former self.

Also, there is no required experience or competence. There should be but there isn't. Aging to 35 helps very little.

If you're too old and your memory is faltering, you're "loosing experience". If your conginitive function is declining, your maturity is also essentially declining, all but in pedantic "maturity=age(ageism)" sense

In fact there is an age limit for an American president. They should be >= 35 y.o. We need to augment it with an upper limit. My choice would be <= 75 y.o.

The DNC is at fault for selected him as the candidate.

I always recommend folks read George Washington's farewell address and it's discussion of political parties.

That likelihood increases with age, and even the most well-informed population does not have the ability to withdraw their consent if it does.

Objective qualifications are much simpler. We could argue for months about whether a president is competent, but it takes like 7 seconds to decide whether they’re older than some arbitrary bar.

All these anecdotal superhuman tales fail the smell test.

There is this hyped longitudinal study, but it doesn't say what roles these "superagers" were in, only that they had slightly better cognitive outcomes than their peers.

No one has cognitive capacity or neuronal volume of a 35 year old at 65, not to speak of 95.

It is delusional to think anyone can escape the effects of aging at this point in time.

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/44/25/e2059232024

in reality, the advantages of the incumbent in an era of safe districts, where the real election is a primary with poor turnout composed mostly of older voters, are almost insurmountable.

and we are currently witnessing what happens when someone hits an age limit the national electorate is unwilling to accept.

IMO, on evidence for when the brain starts to age in a significant way, and supplemented individually based on a robust battery of tests that represent cognitive fitness (something more demanding than n-back and stroop tests).

Unfortunately, I think fantasies about living forever and politics around ageism will prevent this from ever being implemented in our lifetimes.

But all seriousness aside, what makes you think that matters? I'm not going to vote for someone because they're old, in fact to some extent the opposite--I'd rather have a 50 or so year old as president. Are there polls that say old people vote for old people just because they're old?

The "pleb" had no say whatsoever in having only Trump or Biden as a choice.

Party elitists chose the horses in the race.

Further, there are many more democracies than just the USofA, rules vary and you don't see the same lack of choice in some of these other democracies.

My opinion is if the voters are happy to send a geriatric congressman to Washington to sleep through meetings that's fine. But he shouldn't be chairing committees and other offices.

That said Reagan was suffering the beginnings of dementia during the last year or two of his presidency and the world didn't end.

(No really, you cannot conclude anything from circumstantial states that only increase chances of some conclusion, but not determine it as true, strictly. It is also one of the basic principles evident past consideration of prejudice and racism...)

Small but important note, you picked life expectancy for males, not all individuals. For females the life expectancy at birth is over 79 years. The average life expectancy for someone in the US without specifying their sex at birth is north of 76 years. And life expectancy is trending upwards and has for a long time as we eliminate more early mortalities.

Think of the many who through their 80s were cogent, even masterful. Examples include Warren Buffett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, and with women it’s probably even more common, and we can look to Nancy Pelosi, or indeed my own grandmother. Whatever memory slowdown there may be is compensated for by depth of experience.

Then there are those who lose it in their sixties.

In many ways it seems that ageism is one of the last acceptable prejudices.

In Biden’s case, I was struck by the difference in him before and after his son Beau’s death. It seemed like he never recovered. Charisma gone. Eyes turned beady and body stiff. Despite that he was an active and successful president (should be admitted no matter one’s politics), though unpopular.

That’s why I purposely linked to the official US government Actuarial Table.

Biden is 81.

The statistics state that an 81yo will only live 7-more-years.

When a presidential term (4-years) is more than half of your remaining life, the margin of error to die while in office is extreme high.

—-

Another way to look at it is …

The min age for POTUS is 35yo.

The Actuarial Table state that a 35yo will live 40-more-years (to age 75).

Then set age 75 to be the max age

he's showing signs of having trouble doing a good job

Presidential age limit restricts mostly the right of the people for who to vote for. If you can't trust your people to distinguish candidates abilities to perform their duties, maybe a different political system altogether would be more appropriate. Now, when media start covering up, maybe the problem also lies elsewhere

President is only semi democratically decided as a courtesy.

That aside, if there's an issue with age, its having a foundation and reference points that are disconnected and out of touch.

You are almost certainly wrong, but it's also possible that your thereness measurement scale is still calibrated to the briefest and least knowledgeable period of your life.

I intend this charitably.

"But global IQ is an amalgam of different kinds of intelligence, the most popularly studied being fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence which together—along with abilities called working memory and processing speed—are combined to yield global or Full Scale IQ. Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning (abbreviated Gf) reflects the ability to solve novel problems, the kind that aren’t taught in school, whereas Crystallized intelligence or crystallized knowledge (Gc) measures learning and problem solving that are related to schooling and acculturation. And they have very different aging curves.

Gc averages 98 at ages 20-24, rises to 101 by ages 35-44, before declining to 100 (ages 45-54), then 98 (55-64), then 96 (65-69), then 93 (70-74), and 88 (75+).

The decline with age in Gf—solving novel problems—is even more precipitous. Gf peaks at ages 20-24 (100), drops gradually to 99 (25-34) and 96 (35-44) before starting a roller coaster plunge to 91 (45-54), 86 (55-64), 83 (65-69), 79 (70-74), and 72 (75+).

These values are just averages for the entire US population of adults, with the mean IQs for each age higher for more educated individuals. But the same rate of decline across the age range seems to occur for all adults, on average, whether they are semi-skilled workers or university professors. "

When it comes to solving novel problems, the population of 81 year olds is more than two standard deviations worse than the population of 22 year olds. Alternately, the average 81 year old is poorer at solving novel problems than 95% of 22 year olds, and the average (100-IQ) 22 year old is better at solving problems than 95% of 81 year olds; I am including the 22 year olds that you rarely meet because they are silo'd off in a special needs caretaking system.

There is an EXTREMELY PRONOUNCED decline of global IQ with age LONG before dementia, that it is almost completely verboten to admit exists because it combines our fear of our own mortality with our fear of a corporeal self with our fear of being alone with our fear of being useless with the minimum baseline of respect for our elders. Nobody wants to say, or be forced to admit, "I am not as smart or capable as the man I used to be," and many of us would rather eat a bullet or put our fist through someone's face, but it is true nonetheless. By the time any of us have the authority to start forming conventional wisdom (eg, writing textbooks, or doing interview shows, or helping our children raise our grandchildren), this story is not one we want to tell others or ourselves, and so most people cannot accept it.

The user interface for a president to influence the operation of a country is people and relationships. The president doesn't need to solve novel problems, they need to select the right people to identify, prioritise and solve problems (occasionally novel but probably mostly boring and universal human problems), bounded by political constraints.

I guess there is also a major performance element to the role, where "thinking on feet" is very important. Probably something like "IQ" is very helpful with that.

That being said, I really hope we'd all agree a high IQ president would be favorable to a low IQ president.

there’s no _coup_ (not coop) because primary processes are not part of the constitution. candidates can step down (as biden did for the good of the country, and LBJ had done before him). there was no real choice to not pick biden, either, as the incumbent.

the party will now have an open nomination process where delegates will pledge based on how people of their state best want, and keep in mind that most americans did not want biden OR trump, so they really are doing what is best in the interest of american democracy

compare this to the RNC and GOP which has done nothing but embrace one criminal authoritarian crook for the last decade, and you’ll see why your comment doesn’t really make sense.

Hasn't the number one thing anti-biden people have been saying is that he isn't fit for office due to his mental state?

Its bizarre seeing them flip to calling this a coup as if biden stepping down is suddenly an illegal/unconstitutional thing.

I consider this "concern trolling".

They said for 4 years how he's barely mentally there / can barely speak / not fit for office, and then when the Democratic party pressures him to step down, they go all surprised_pikachu_face.png.

I think the point is that at least people voted to make Biden their candidate.

Now those votes mean nothing and someone else will pick their candidate for them instead.

The VP pick is pure politics at it's worst. Just look at McCain / Palin.

Read as "who knows how much more entrenched future politicians will be able to be? who knows how many more favors they will owe, how many more donors will have their ear?"