If Democrats pick Joe Biden as their next presidential nominee, he will set a new standard for political longevity. In the process, he will provoke complex questions about relevance, age and shifting political attitudes in the US.
Should Biden prevail next year, he would become the Democratic nominee exactly 50 years after he won his first elected office, to the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970. It would be 48 years after Biden first won a federal office by capturing a US Senate seat from Delaware in 1972.
No candidate from any major party has captured a presidential nomination for the first time that many years after he or she first won elected office since the formation of the modern party system in 1828, according to a review I conducted of presidential races stretching back to then. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, CNN