WASHINGTON: Age has become an important factor in the 2024 general elections in the US, an eminent Indian-American Democrat has said, signalling that the youths and minorities who were a strong pillar of support for President Joe Biden in 2020, seem to lack enthusiasm and energy about the ruling party in the current election cycle.Biden, 81, is the oldest president in American history.Former president Donald Trump, 77, is likely to be his main rival from the opposition Republican Party in the November presidential elections.Indian-American Democrat leader Swadesh Chatterjee, who has been part of the Democratic Party for several decades, said that the party’s younger base lacks the enthusiasm and energy seen during the 2020 election cycle.The older generation of the Democrats are not giving enough opportunities to the talented and aspiring younger generation, said Chatterjee, adding that age is a factor in the coming elections for the young, minority, and Latino.Chatterjee, who has been a close friend of Biden for decades, going back to when he was a Senator, said the president and senior members of the Democratic Party should bring new blood: the young, energetic, and educated.”There are a number of those people, and they are doing a good job in the United States Senate and Congress, and we should try to support those people and should bring new leaders like Barack Obama that will get the Democratic Party on a different level,” Chatterjee told PTI in an interview in Cary, North Carolina, where he lives.”If you look at the Democratic Party as a whole, their base was mostly African American, young voters and the people who really are successful, but they want this country and maintain democracy around the world and in the US,” he said.Asserting that voters, especially the younger ones, are not as excited about the 2024 election cycle, he said, “That has something to do with age and something to do with the way the Israel-Palestine war is handled. It has something to do with the way the migration is handled.” “It was okay that we withdrew from Afghanistan, but the way we withdrew because that is really overriding,” Chatterjee, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2001 for his role in the India-US relationship post-nuclear tests, said.
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