I pulled data on the country’s population over the past 120 years and compared it to the age of the president during that period. And I can say: yes, Biden’s age is still exceptional…

The president in 1900 was William McKinley, aged a relatively young 57. But in 1900, 88 percent of the country’s population was younger than that, so he was an old president relative to the nation’s population that year. In 2003, when George W. Bush was 57, he was older than only about 71 percent of the population…

But then there’s Biden. Yes, America is older than it used to be, but Biden’s age is still fairly exceptional. He’s older than almost 96 percent of the population — the second-biggest gulf between a president’s age and the population’s. The victor here is Ronald Reagan who, in his last year in office, turned 77, making him older than a fraction more of the population than Biden is now.

Of course Reagan only tops the list if you measure the last year of his 2nd term against the middle of Biden’s first. Biden will take the lead next year or the one after. Despite all of that, Politico reports today that Biden is planning to run again, convinced that Democrats don’t have anyone else who can plausibly take on Trump.

Days after his 80th birthday, President Joe Biden gathered loved ones on Nantucket to earnestly begin family discussions about his 2024 plans.

The talks come a week after the 82-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be handing over her leadership role, declaring: “The hour has come for a new generation to lead.” Those words echoed Biden’s own from the presidential campaign trail where he once declared himself a “transition candidate” who would restore stability to the White House before passing the torch to younger leaders.

But that was then. Now, it increasingly appears that Biden isn’t ready to cede the stage just yet.

While there has been simmering tension within the Democratic Party about making a generational change, Biden’s fate appears to be intrinsically linked to Donald Trump, whom he defeated in 2020 and has deemed a threat to American democracy.

The former president has already declared his own 2024 campaign and Biden has privately made clear that he believes he might be the only Democrat who could vanquish Trump again. And while Pelosi had an established line of succession in the House, those close to Biden say the field to follow him is far more unsettled…

If Biden opted against a run, few in Washington believe the field would clear for Vice President Kamala Harris, and that could create a bruising primary battle.

Imagine being VP Harris and reading this. It couldn’t be more clear that Biden and his team have no faith in her. At the same time, he’s unable to jump ship because the optics of side-stepping the first black Vice President is not something he could get away with. So at the end of the day the Democrats best option for 2024 is an 80-year-old man who struggles to remember who is alive and who is dead.