Every election season, someone insists voters should simply pick “the most qualified candidate.” But what exactly constitutes “qualified”? And who decides?
By “most qualified,” they usually mean the longest résumé. If that’s how our system truly worked, we could skip elections altogether and declare the oldest person on the ballot the winner. There’s a word for that: gerontocracy. It’s distinguished from other systems, like democracy.
The problem with insisting on the most qualified candidate is that no uniform method measures qualifications. Was Donald Trump the most qualified person to be president in 2016? Plenty of his voters would tell you he was. After all, he had a popular TV show, a successful business, and he wasn’t a career politician.
Are the millions of people who chose him over Hillary Clinton completely wrong? Well, yes. But these voters illustrate the problem. Different people describe their ideal candidate in different ways.
That is a feature of our democracy, not a bug. Letting the common people raise up one of their own to govern themselves was a radical idea, and it’s what separated us from the class-based, credential-obsessed societies of the Old World. It aligned the interests of our government with the people it actually served — a people with a nation, not a sovereign with subjects.
But that freedom is double-edged because it also lets people choose poorly.
Our Founding Fathers recognized the distinction between being “most qualified” and being the best person for the job. In the Federalist Papers, Madison wrote that the doors of government should be “open to merit of every description … whether young or old,” and that no qualification “of civil profession” should “fetter the judgment” of the people. Citizens, he argued, could be trusted to decide which qualifications truly mattered.
The flip side is that no résumé, however impressive, entitles anyone to a job. Consider the case of Robert Bork. When President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, he was, by any reasonable definition, one of the most qualified individuals to ever receive a nomination.
As solicitor general, Chief Justice Warren Burger called him the most effective counsel to appear before the court. In that role, Bork would become a mentor to a bipartisan crop of legal scholars such as Frank Easterbrook and Robert Reich. His reputation as one of the nation’s most influential legal thinkers on antitrust law earned him an appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where he served with distinction.
So why, then, did the Senate reject Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court by a vote of 58-42?
To make a long story short, Bork held views on civil rights and privacy that the Senate found untenable, and even six Republican senators voted against him. In 1995, future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan cited Bork’s two-week marathon confirmation hearing as a model for future confirmation hearings. She praised the hearing’s “meaningful discussion of legal issues” — a view she would later discard when she faced the Senate herself during her own confirmation.
American history books are filled with Robert Borks. But for every Goliath who falls, there’s a David who was never supposed to win. You’ve probably heard of one: Joe Biden. Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate at age 29. During his 1972 campaign, Biden overtly challenged his 63-year-old opponent as too old to understand modern issues, calling him “dear old dad.”
To his credit, Biden himself joked about his change of fortune in 2024, remarking how he’d spent half his career being “too damn young” and the other half “too damn old.”
The fact is, young people have always played a significant role in American politics. Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was 32, and James Madison was 36 during the Constitutional Convention. John F. Kennedy and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both went to Congress at age 29. Even Jerry Brown first became governor at age 36. All of their qualifications were called into question.
When polled, voters will tell you the backgrounds that appeal to them in the abstract: parent, teacher, small-business owner, etc. But when actual candidates come into the picture, those attributes take a back seat to philosophical alignment and who voters trust to fight for people like them. A candidate’s résumé is merely a heuristic we use in place of real knowledge, much like endorsements.
This election, and in all future elections, I encourage voters to closely scrutinize not only a candidate’s experience but everything they can glean about what kind of elected official that candidate will be in office. Our founders trusted us to use our best judgment in discerning who should lead us. We ought to try.
Kevin Sabellico is a San Diego County planning commissioner and a student at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law.
