For voters, when does old become too old?
When a reporter asked President Joe Biden on Thursday night about concerns about his age, his first instinct was to reject the premise. He replied in part: “That is your judgment. That is not the judgment of the press.”
The question was about the public’s concern, not the press, but either way the concerns over his age were not just those of one reporter.
A clear majority of Americans harbor serious doubts about it, polls show. To take just one example: In New York Times/Siena polling in the fall, more than 70% of battleground state voters agreed with the statement that Biden is “just too old to be an effective president.” More than 60% said they didn’t think Biden had “the mental sharpness to be an effective president.” And fair or not, fewer than half of voters express similar doubts about Donald Trump’s age or mental acuity.
Of all the reasons Biden has narrowly trailed Trump in the polls for five straight months, this is arguably the single most straightforward explanation. It’s what voters are telling pollsters, whether in open-ended questioning about Biden or when specifically asked about his age, and they say it in overwhelming numbers. In Times/Siena polling, even a majority of Biden’s own supporters say he’s too old to be an effective president. His political problems might just be that simple.
Now, just because it’s easy to blame Biden’s age for his political woes doesn’t make it so. There’s no doubt that voters have concerns, but it’s very hard to figure out how much support it’s costing Biden in the polls. We can’t know, for instance, what his approval rating would be if he were 10 or 20 years younger. Maybe it would be nearly as low, because of the border, the Middle East, earlier inflation, lingering resentments and anxieties after the pandemic — alongside the corroding effects of partisan polarization.
Why can’t we know? The age issue is not like the economy, in which easily measurable data helps us make sense of its import. We know 10% inflation or 10% unemployment could be sufficient to cost a president reelection. We’ve seen it before, based on decades of hard data. In contrast, the severity of Biden’s age problem is almost entirely up for debate. That perception is mostly subjective — based on how he appears and sounds, not simply based on the fact of his being 81. (Trump is 77.)
Superficial and subjective issues like these are hard to analyze, as evidenced by the very wide range of responses to Biden’s news conference Thursday. Even a question as simple as “why do voters think Biden is too old, but not Mr. Trump?” is hard to answer. It’s clear voters believe so, but the likely explanation is just as superficial and subjective as the feelings of individual voters. Subjective, of course, does not mean unimportant. Even the most superficial factors like appearance or voice depth can play a powerful role in vote choice. Biden seems to have crossed an invisible line demarking whether a candidate isn’t just old but “too” old in the view of many voters; Trump has not.
What’s more, the questions about Biden’s age are almost entirely without precedent in the era of modern elections. There has never been a president who has faced this level of concern about his age — not even Ronald Reagan in 1984, who was eight years younger than Biden this cycle. That’s exactly why it’s easy to imagine how concerns about his age might be politically potent. But it also means we’ve never observed the political effect of something like this before.
Almost every election features something unprecedented, with the potential to shake up the usual patterns of politics. In the last four cycles alone, we’ve witnessed the first Black presidential majorparty nominee, the first female such nominee, the first without military or elected experience, the first modern election amid a pandemic and so on. In all of these cases, pundits and analysts speculated — very reasonably — about whether these novel candidates or circumstances might yield an unexpected result.
But in the end, those extraordinary circumstances didn’t yield extraordinary election results. The final numbers looked about as you might have expected if you didn’t know anything unusual promised to shake up the race. It was a huge surprise that Trump won in 2016, for instance, but it was only surprising insofar as an unconventional candidate managed to achieve such an utterly conventional result. If Republicans had nominated someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, no one would have been surprised to see Hillary Clinton narrowly lose the election.
This history is somewhat reassuring for Biden, who would be the first octogenarian nominee. If he loses in 2024, it will count as the rare case when something out of the ordinary — his age — produced an out-of-the-ordinary result by the standard of usual politics.