What voters think about Joe Biden and the age issue

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago

Most US voters are concerned about the age of their next leader — but that doesn’t necessarily mean the issue will determine how they vote in November’s presidential election. 

Poll after poll shows that high percentages of American voters worry that President Joe Biden, and to a lesser extent former president Donald Trump, are not mentally or physically up to another term in the White House. A recent NBC news poll found that more than three-quarters of those surveyed had either major or moderate concerns that Biden would not have “the necessary mental and physical health” to serve again. A recent swing state poll found 82 per cent of voters surveyed said Biden or both candidates were too old, while 47 per cent said the same about Trump or both candidates.  

Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, are the oldest candidates ever to run for president of the US — and no one is letting them forget it. A report released recently by US Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur called Biden a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”, prompting Democrats to fight back with a physical examination that found him “fit for duty” — though that did not include a cognitive test.

Some polls show support for Biden behind that of Trump, ostensibly partly because voters worry more about his age than that of his scarcely younger Republican rival. But veteran poll watchers take this with a grain of salt.

“It’s like asking if they care about climate change, of course [voters] are going to say they do, so if you ask if a politician is too old . . . they will overwhelmingly say yes — but go on to elect them anyway. Old politicians get re-elected all the time,” Alex Conant, Republican strategist and former communications director for the 2016 presidential bid of Republican Marco Rubio, told me. He says Republicans are wrong to think they can defeat Biden on the age issue.   

Others point out that concerns about Biden’s mental wobbles are, to some extent, already in the price. Even back in 1996 when I first covered him for the FT, I was hardly awed by the then-senator’s acuity. Public gaffes have always been his stock in trade; mixing up countries and confusing dead world leaders for living ones hardly came out of the blue.

After Hur’s report castigating Biden’s memory last month, “the pundits went crazy about the age issue”, says Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll. But when Marquette polled voters around the time of the report’s release, Franklin says he was “surprised there was so little movement” in voter perceptions of his age. “In November [2023], 57 per cent said ‘too old to be president’ described Biden very well and 55 per cent said the same in February,” he said, noting that “the image of Biden is baked in”. 

Marquette’s latest poll also found older voters were less worried about Biden’s age than younger ones — which could matter in an election year when more Americans turn 65 than ever before. US seniors vote at a higher rate than younger people, and as Franklin points out: “young people think Biden is older than old people do”. 

Among 18- to 29-year-old registered voters, 91 per cent said “too old to be president” describes Biden “very or somewhat well”, while the figure was 76 per cent for those over 60. “If you are 24, someone 81 looks ancient, but if you are our age, you tend to think ‘he’s just getting started’,” says Franklin, who at 69 is a contemporary of mine.  

Rick Popely, 75, a classmate in my senior conversational Spanish class at the local community college, speaks for many voters when he says: “I would not vote against somebody because they are old and I would not vote for somebody because they are younger. There have to be better reasons than that.” 

“For a lot of people, this election is a choice between two bads, not between a good and a bad,” says Franklin. For voters who already don’t like either candidate, “age is just another reason not to vote for him — not the reason not to vote for him”, he says.

Most voters have probably already made up their minds anyway: Biden can confuse Egypt and Mexico, and Trump can muddle up rival Nikki Haley and Democrat Nancy Pelosi. But I doubt it will stop either of them getting elected.