by Widespread concerns about President Biden’s age pose a growing threat to his re-election bid, and a majority of voters who supported him in 2020 now say he is too old to effectively lead the country, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Colegio de Siena.
The poll signaled a fundamental shift in the way voters who backed Biden four years ago came to view him. A surprising 61 percent said they thought he was “too old” to be an effective president.
A sizable proportion were even more concerned: Nineteen percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020, and 13 percent of those who said they would back him in November, said the 81-year-old president’s age was such a problem that I was no longer capable of doing the job.
Questions about Biden’s age transcend generations, gender, race and education, underscoring the president’s failure to dispel both concerns within his own party and Republican attacks that paint him as senile. Seventy-three percent of all registered voters said he was too old to be effective and 45 percent expressed their belief that he could not do the job.
This concern, which has long emerged in polls and in quiet conversations with Democratic officials, appears to be growing as Biden moves toward formally capturing his party’s nomination. The survey was conducted more than two weeks after scrutiny of his age intensified in early February, when a special prosecutor described him in a report as a “well-intentioned elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties as that age advances.”
Previous polls suggest that voters’ reservations about Biden’s age have increased over time. In the six most battleground states surveyed in October, 55 percent of those who voted for him in 2020 said they believed he was too old to be an effective president, a sharp increase from the 16 percent of Democrats who shared that opinion. concern in a slightly different group. of swing states in 2020.
Voters have not expressed the same anxieties about Donald J. Trump, who at 77 is just four years younger than Biden. His likely revenge would make them the oldest presidential candidates in history.
If re-elected, Biden would break his own record as the oldest sitting president, while Trump would be the second-oldest if he won. Trump would be 82 years old at the end of his term and Biden would be 86 years old.
Otto Abad, 50, an independent voter in Scott, Louisiana, said he voted for Biden in 2020 but planned to throw his support behind Trump if they faced each other again. He last time wanted a less divisive figure in the White House after the chaos of the Trump administration. He now worries that Biden is not prepared for a second term.
“If I was in that mindset, I didn’t realize it at the time,” Abad said. “She has aged a lot. With the exception of Trump, all presidents seem to age a lot during their presidency.”
And he added: “Trump, one of the few things I would say well about him is that nothing seems to bother him. He seems like he’s in the same frame of mind that he was in 10 years ago, 12 years ago, 15 years ago. He is like a cockroach.”
Abad is by no means alone. Only 15 percent of voters who supported Trump in 2020 said they thought he was too old to be an effective president, and 42 percent of all voters said the same, a much smaller share than Biden. Polls from the 2020 race indicate that the share of voters who believe Trump is too old has also increased over the past four years, but not as dramatically as for Biden.
In the most recent Times poll, 19 percent of all voters said Trump’s age was such a problem that he was not capable of handling the presidency. And in a sign of Republicans’ much greater confidence in their likely nominee, fewer than 1 percent of voters who backed Trump in 2020 said his age made him unfit.
Biden and his allies have rejected concerns about his age and mental acuity as unfair and inaccurate. His campaign says his coalition will return to supporting the president once he fully recognizes that Trump could take back the White House. He also maintains that Biden faced age concerns in 2020 and still won.
However, Biden is now four years older and it may be impossible to fully reassure voters about his age, given the inexorable passage of time. The poll indicates that concerns about him are not only pernicious but are now also intertwined with the number of voters who watch him.
Calvin Nurjadin, a Democrat from Cedar Park, Texas, who plans to support Biden in November, said he was not convinced by politicians in his party who had publicly exaggerated their direct observations about Biden’s mental acuity.
“You just saw the clips of, you know, him having flashbacks on stage and, you know, during the debate and the discussion where he freezes a lot,” said Nurjadin, who does data entry work. “That he is smart and fit is not very convincing.”
Although the country is bitterly divided and Republican voters have overwhelmingly negative views on Biden’s age, Democrats do not appear to be any more concerned about the effects of time on Trump than on Biden. A similar percentage of Democrats said each man was too old to be effective.
The survey attempted to more deeply understand how voters thought about Biden and Trump’s abilities. The survey first asked whether each man was too old to be effective. Voters who said yes were asked a follow-up question about whether that age was such a problem that Biden or Trump were incapable of doing the job, a stronger measure that led voters to consider the candidate’s basic fitness. for the position.
Shermaine Elmore, 44, a small business owner in Baltimore, voted for Biden four years ago, endorsing the Democratic candidate as she had in previous elections.
But it said it had made more money under the Trump administration, blaming inflation and gas prices for its losses during the Biden administration. He planned to vote for Trump this fall.
Of Biden, he said: “I don’t think he’s in the best health to make a decision if the country needs the president to make a decision.”
Samuel Friday, 28, a database administrator and Democrat in Goose Creek, South Carolina, said he planned to vote for Biden but had some apprehension about whether the president would survive a second term.
“In terms of his health, I think people have said he’s as healthy as he can be, which is always positive,” he said. “But when you reach a certain age, there is a greater risk that the president will die in office. And I’m not sure Kamala Harris is the choice I would want for president.”
In fact, the vice president is viewed no more positively than Biden. Only 36 percent of all voters said they had a favorable opinion of Ms. Harris.
About two-thirds of those who voted for Biden in 2020 expressed a positive opinion of Harris, about the same as the president. And in a head-to-head race with Trump, Harris fared no better than Biden, losing by six percentage points.
While Democrats are still divided, they also appear to be slowly uniting behind Biden’s candidacy. Forty-five percent of Democratic primary voters said he should not be their party’s nominee, compared to 50 percent who expressed that opinion in July.
Margaret Stewart, a retiree from Westland, Michigan, said she would have preferred a younger candidate but wasn’t particularly bothered by Biden’s age. The president, she said, sometimes makes verbal mistakes when he is stressed, but he is mentally fit to serve as president.
“Some of the little faults he had, one, he’s had forever,” he said, “and I honestly think his memory is better than mine was when I was 40.” And he added: “He is not senile.”
Overall, voters generally express warmer opinions about Biden than Trump. Fifty-one percent of registered voters said the president had the personality and temperament to be president, compared to 41 percent who said the same about Trump. Among Republicans, 27 percent said Trump lacked those traits, while 14 percent of Democrats said the same about Biden.
Brian Wells, 35, a lawyer from Huntsville, Alabama, described himself as a reluctant Biden supporter. He was frustrated that there were no other options to top the presidential ticket and was convinced that Biden was not fully up to the duties of the office.
Still, Wells plans to cast his vote to re-elect the president in November.
“He is incompetent. He is clearly struggling to fulfill his duties,” he said. “It’s clear that he has reached the point where he is too old for the job. But he is still one step ahead of Trump.”
baker stretcher contributed reports.
The New York Times/Siena College survey of 980 registered voters nationwide was conducted via mobile and landline telephones, using live interviewers, from February 25 to 28, 2024. The margin of sampling error for the question choice of the presidential ballot is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points among registered voters. Crosstabs and methodology are available here.
