How Joe Biden Could Address the Age Issue

Biden’s age, of course, has long been a topic of debate, and conservatives have spent much of his Presidency sharing clips of names misremembered and words misspoken. (Last month, at an event in Iowa, Trump even mocked Biden’s stutter.) But the report, carrying the imprimatur of official inquiry, shifted the atmospheric conditions. If old age was in the air, the clouds burst open. Hur’s words were so cutting because they resonate with what many voters already think. In a swing-state poll conducted by the Times last fall, seventy-one per cent of respondents said that Biden was too old to be President; more than six in ten thought that he lacked the mental acuity for the job. (In national polling, a majority of Democrats also say he’s too old for a second term.) Other surveys suggest that being old is seen as a kind of crime: Americans are equally loath to support candidates over the age of eighty and candidates who’ve been charged with a felony. A third of respondents would set the maximum age for elected officials at seventy (and some would set it even lower). By that standard, about a fifth of the current Congress would be aged out.