Former President Donald Trump is more than 38 years older than his running mate in the 2024 presidential election, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. If elected in November, they’d be further apart in age than any president-vice president pair in U.S. history – by almost a decade.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, were born about six months apart in 1964. If they win the nation’s top jobs, their age gap would be one of the smallest in history.
Ahead of the 2024 election, we wanted to take a look at age differences between presidents and vice presidents throughout U.S. history, as well as age gaps between presidential nominees.
We calculated age differences using historical information from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and other government biographies.
The analysis of nominees for president includes those nominated by the two major parties since 1856 – the first election to feature nominees from both the Democratic and Republican parties. In the case of the split Democratic conventions of 1860, the analysis only includes the nominee selected at the official convention, Stephen Douglas.
The median age gap between U.S. presidents and their vice presidents is 6.7 years.
Of the 51 unique pairs to have held these offices, a majority (59%) have been closer than 10 years in age. A third have had an age difference of 10 to 19.9 years. And only four president-VP pairs (8%) have had an age difference of 20 years or more.
The largest age gap in the offices’ history is 29.7 years: President James Buchanan, who served from 1857 to 1861, was nearly three decades older than his vice president, John Breckinridge.
Breckinridge is the youngest person to ever hold that office, inaugurated at just 36 years old; Buchanan was 65 at the time. Vance and Trump, by comparison, would be 40 and 78 on Inauguration Day 2025.
Related: Most U.S. vice presidents in recent decades have sought the presidency, but relatively few have won
Several other presidents and vice presidents have had significant age gaps:
- 1989-93: George H.W. Bush was 22.6 years older than Dan Quayle.
- 1953-61: Dwight Eisenhower was 22.2 years older than Richard Nixon.
- 2021-25: Joe Biden is 21.9 years older than Harris.
The smallest age gap between a president and vice president is 0.1 years. Abraham Lincoln was born about six weeks after his second-term vice president, Andrew Johnson. They served together briefly in 1865, until Lincoln’s assassination.
Other pairs with less than a year of age difference include:
- 1973-74: Nixon was about six months older than Gerald Ford.
- 1861-65: Lincoln was roughly six months older than Hannibal Hamlin, his first-term vice president.
- 1869-73: Ulysses S. Grant was about 11 months older than Schuyler Colfax.
Administrations with an older VP
Though it’s true in most of the previous examples, the president isn’t always the older of the two. The VP has been older than the president in about half (24) of the 51 executive pairs to have served. In seven of those cases, they’ve been 10-plus years older.
Notably, Biden is 18.7 years older than the president he himself served under, Barack Obama. Upon first taking office in 2009, Obama was 47 and Biden was 66. They have the largest age gap among pairs with an older vice president.
Age gaps between rival presidential nominees
Trump, already one of the oldest men to have occupied the Oval Office, now faces a much younger opponent this fall in Harris.
The two are 18.4 years apart in age – the sixth-largest age difference between a Republican and a Democratic nominee for president. That’s considerably higher than the median age gap between Democratic and Republican nominees of 7.6 years.
Since 1856 (the first election to include both a Democratic and Republican nominee for president), 60% of unique matchups have featured candidates closer than 10 years in age. Another 28% have included candidates with age gaps between 10 and 19.9 years.
Five presidential ballots (13%) have seen candidates who were 20 years apart or more:
- 2008: Obama was 24.9 years younger than John McCain.
- 1996: Bill Clinton was 23.1 years younger than Bob Dole.
- 1992: Clinton was 22.2 years younger than G.H.W. Bush.
- 1856: Buchanan was 21.7 years older than John Fremont.
- 1944: Franklin D. Roosevelt was 20.1 years older than Thomas Dewey.
