Ronald Reagan was 73 years old when he ran for re-election in 1984. In a debate against his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, Mr. Reagan appeared visibly tired and confused, leading to speculation that he was too old to be an effective president. When queried about that possibility at a second debate two weeks later, a famous quip silenced his critics and effectively ended Mr. Mondale’s chances for an upset.

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Mr. Reagan said in the second debate. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Even Mr. Mondale laughed. A fortnight later, Mr. Reagan was re-elected in a landslide. But we forget now that his age was an issue, and his mental competence continued to be a topic of speculation throughout his second term. He announced five years after he left office that he had been recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

His predecessor and three of his first four successors were elected before their 55th birthday. Two of them took office in their 40s. It is only in the last decade that we have lost our preference for a younger chief executive. President Donald Trump was 78 years old when he was inaugurated in 2025; a close second was his predecessor Joe Biden, who was a slightly younger 78 on Inauguration Day in 2021.

How old is too old? Mr. Biden was the subject of frequent speculation about his mental acuity, and a disastrous debate performance in 2024 led him to end his run for a second term. Mr. Trump’s erratic behavior and rhetoric in recent months have led to calls for him to be removed from power under the terms of the 25th Amendment. 

In Congress, politicians on both sides of the aisle have been missing for extended periods. Most recently, the attention has been on 84-year-old Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, whose last public appearance was in early June. He issued a statement that he had been hospitalized after a fall, as well as a photo of him during his recovery, but has not responded to calls from the governor of Kentucky to address his constituents more directly.

In the first half of 2023, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, then 89, was absent for roughly three months because of complications from shingles. After returning to Capitol Hill that May, she passed away, still in office, in September at age 90. During her final term in office, Representative Kay Granger of Texas was absent for almost six months of 2024. She was revealed to be living in a memory care facility in Texas during that time. After retiring from the House, she died in 2026 at age 83.

More members of Congress are over the age of 70, including a third of current senators, than ever before in our history. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is 92, one of 24 members of Congress over the age of 80. As of March, 13 of them were running for reelection. 

A July 2026 CNN survey showed that fully 70 percent of those polled would be “uneasy” or “upset” if their political party nominated someone over the age of 70 for office. Despite public sentiment, however, the link between seniority and influence in Congress and the advantages incumbents enjoy in elections tend to keep older legislators running and winning. The problem is as much one of incentives as it is of age and requires a structural solution.

A perhaps unlikely comparison here is valuable: the Catholic Church. An institution not often known for its nimble response to changing social realities has nevertheless addressed head-on the reality that people are living longer and longer thanks to modern medicine—and, in many cases, beyond the limits of their physical and mental prowess. In 1965, the bishops at the Second Vatican Council “earnestly requested” elderly bishops who had become less able to serve to tender their resignations. A year later, Pope Paul VI made that request a mandate. Bishops now submit their resignations on their 75th birthday; it is up to the pope when to accept them. Paul VI later restricted voting in a conclave to cardinals under 80.

While no such rule exists for popes, an 85-year-old Pope Benedict XVI overturned centuries of papal precedent by announcing in 2013 that he would resign the papacy after he had “come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.” It is likely that his decision was informed by seeing the effects on the church of John Paul II’s reduced capacity as he publicly suffered from the infirmities of age during the last years of his papacy. Five years before, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., 79, had overturned five centuries of Jesuit tradition by becoming the order’s first superior general to resign. His successor, Adolfo Nicolas, did the same in 2016 at age 80, citing advanced age.

The United States is not opposed to setting constitutional age limits for its elected officials—but they are only directed toward the young. One must be over 25 years of age to be elected to the House of Representatives, over 30 to join the Senate, and at least 35 to be elected president. 

Any proposal to put an upper bound on the age of office holders may be attacked as ageism, which should be rejected as strongly as any other bigotry. But an age limit, whether a minimum or a maximum, is not equivalent to ageism. It is a structural boundary for the good of the body politic. Indeed, like term limits for the presidency, age limits could help provide the electorate with better options by preventing some from clinging to power beyond the point where their holding it serves the common good.

The simplest and most robust solution for the tendency of elected officials to hold on to office beyond their capacity to serve is a mirror image of the age limits we already have: a constitutional amendment restricting eligibility for our nation’s higher offices to those under 75.

Any amendment proposal, of course, faces a steep uphill path and advocacy for it would be the work of years or even decades. That is all the more reason to begin discussion of it, since our elected officials have demonstrated that they do not reliably step down from office when they need to do so for reasons of age. As we are learning on many fronts, democracy is fragile when politicians cling to power at all costs. Limits that regularize handing governance over to the next officeholders, and the next generation, can help remind us all that public service is a privilege and an obligation, not a personal entitlement.

This article appears in September 2026.