Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (D), 37, said this week that he believes Democrats are ready to back leaders from a younger generation, pointing out that the party’s two 2020 frontrunners, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), have been in the “public sphere” for longer than he has been alive.
Today co-host Craig Melvin noted that Sanders, 77, and Biden, 76, are roughly twice Buttigieg’s age and asked him what that says about his party right now.
“Well, I think our party is certainly ready to lift up leaders from a new generation,” Buttigieg told Melvin. “The exciting thing is that I think this race will create a fair playing field where people who’ve been in the public sphere for longer than I’ve been alive and people like me get to compete on the basis of our ideas.”
Biden was elected to the Senate from Delaware in 1972 and served two terms as former President Barack Obama’s vice president.
Sanders was elected the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1980 before serving in the House of Representatives from 1991-2007. Sanders has been in the Senate since 2007.
Buttigieg, though, has also spent most of his adult life in politics. He has been the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for eight years. He was first elected in 2011 when he was 29 years of age, the same Biden was when he first got elected to the Senate.