Majority of Biden’s 2020 voters say he’s too old to be effective

Widespread concerns about President Joe Biden’s age pose a deepening threat to his reelection bid, with a majority of voters who supported him in 2020 now saying he is too old to lead the country effectively, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

The survey pointed to a fundamental shift in how voters who backed Biden four years ago have come to see him. A striking 61% said they thought he was “just too old” to be an effective president.

A sizable share was even more worried: Nineteen percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020, and 13% of those who said they would back him in November, said the 81-year-old president’s age was such a problem that he was no longer capable of handling the job.

The misgivings about Biden’s age cut across generations, gender, race and education, underscoring the president’s failure to dispel both concerns within his own party and Republican attacks painting him as senile. Seventy-three percent of all registered voters said he was too old to be effective, and 45% expressed a belief that he could not do the job.

This unease, which has long surfaced in polls and in quiet conversations with Democratic officials, appears to be growing as Biden moves toward formally capturing his party’s nomination. The poll was conducted more than two weeks after scrutiny of his age intensified in early February, when a special counsel described him in a report as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

Previous polling suggests that voters’ reservations about Biden’s age have grown over time. In six top battleground states surveyed in October, 55% 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% of Democrats who shared that concern in a slightly different set of swing states in 2020.

Voters have not expressed the same anxieties about former President Donald Trump, who at 77 is just four years Biden’s junior. Their likely rematch would make them the oldest presidential nominees in history.

If reelected, Biden would beat his own record as the oldest sitting president, while Trump would be the second-oldest if he won. Trump would be 82 at the end of the term, and Biden would be 86.

Otto Abad, 50, an independent voter in Scott, La., said he voted for Biden in 2020 but planned to flip his support to Trump if they faced off again. Last time, he wanted a less divisive figure in the White House after the chaos of the Trump administration. Now, he worries that Biden is not quite up for a second term.

“If he was in this sort of mental shape, I didn’t realize back then,” Abad said. “He’s aged a lot. With the exception of Trump, every president seems to age a lot during their presidency.”

He added: “Trump, one of the few things I would say good about him, is that nothing seems to bother him. He seems like he’s in the same mental shape he was 10 years ago, 12 years ago, 15 years ago. He’s like a cockroach.”

Abad is far from alone. Just 15% of voters who supported Trump in 2020 said they thought he was now too old to be an effective president, and 42% of all voters said the same — a much lower share than for Biden.