Presidential Age Debate: Trump and Biden Too Old for Another Term, Poll Reveals
Washington-TND - February 13, 2024 6:11 am
WASHINGTON (TND) — Age has become a central issue in the 2024 presidential election as both parties’ frontrunners for the nomination are the oldest presidents in U.S. history and are giving voters concerns about their health and mental fitness to lead the country through a four-year term.
A majority of voters believe 81-year-old President Joe Biden and 77-year-old former President Donald Trump are both too old for another term as president, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the release of a special counsel’s report on an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Fifty-nine percent said both are too old, while 27% said that only Biden is too old to serve another term, but not Trump. About 1 in 10 Americans said neither are too old to serve a second term.
The snapshot poll came after special counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report that cleared the president of facing charges but also raised multiple questions about his memory and mental abilities. Biden’s legal team and other Democrats have criticized the inclusion of statements about the president’s memory and description of him being a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The White House and Biden’s campaign have tried to counter the potential damage the report could have on the president’s reelection chances in the days since its release, including a press conference in the hours after where Biden defiantly defended his memory and said he disagreed with Hur’s depiction.
Biden’s personal counsel Bob Bauer said on CBS’ “Face The Nation” that the report was a “shoddy work product” and that it “went off the rails.”
“The special counsel’s decision to cherry-pick in a very misleading way some of the references that we’re discussing here is an example of what I call a really shabby work product and completely out of bounds for a prosecutor,” Bauer said.
Biden’s campaign has also tried to point to Trump’s missteps to minimize the attention on the president’s miscues, but early indications on voters’ reactions to the special counsel report are not favorable to the president.
“Voters just seem to have more of a problem with that with Biden than Trump. Now look, maybe over the course of the campaign maybe that changes. You know, maybe Trump is the one who starts to make more news for having verbal gaffes and whatnot,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
The ABC News/Ipsos poll found age is an increasingly big issue for both leading candidates, but that it is a bigger problem for Biden so far.
