By Kos
Daily Kos Staff
It’s been the dominant narrative for the campaign cycle so far: Voters think both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are too old to run for president. It’s a narrative Republicans have avidly fueled, and in the end, it’s the narrative that forced Biden out of the race.
But having firmly established that being old is bad, Republicans now have to confront that it is Trump who is the historically old candidate in clear cognitive decline. Democrats are giving voters what they asked for—a younger candidate—while Republicans are being led by an old, tired, and addled candidate.
During his speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, “America cannot afford four more years of a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ presidency,” claiming that “[o]ur enemies do not confine their designs to between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. We need a commander-in-chief who can lead 24 hours a day and seven days a week.” (Notably, Trump had the lightest schedule of any president since 1933, according to a Roll Call Factba.se analysis.)
In an ad from her candidacy to become the Republican presidential nominee, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said, “I’ll just say it: Biden’s too old. And Congress is the most exclusive nursing home in America.”
The Republican-controlled House even held hearings on the subject of Biden being too old.
But here’s the cold reality: Trump today, at 78, is older than Biden was when he ran four years ago, making him the oldest presidential nominee in American history. (Note: Biden dropped out on Sunday as the presumptive nominee.) And voters didn’t just have doubts about Biden’s age.
A Monmouth University poll from October 2023 found that 48% of voters thought Trump was too old to serve another term. A Gallup poll from January found that 66% of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for a candidate over the age of 80, which was part of Biden’s challenge. But 35% said they wouldn’t vote for a candidate over the age of 70. (That poll also found that 70% wouldn’t vote for a candidate convicted of a felony by a jury, and plenty are voting for one, so it’s a nice reminder that poll respondents aren’t always taking everything into account when they answer a survey question like that.) An ABC News/Ipsos poll from February found that 59% of Americans thought both candidates were “too old for another term as president.” And a July poll published by the Wall Street Journal found that 56% of voters, including 36% of Republicans, thought Trump was “too old to run for president.”
Trump has benefitted from Biden taking the brunt of attention on the age question, and that’s fair enough. Biden is older, and as we saw at the debate, he wasn’t the same Biden we’d been used to seeing. The fact that he had good days didn’t detract from the horror show of the debate. But Democrats have turned a new leaf and are offering up that younger candidate voters claim to want. And what are Republicans doing? They’re sticking with their grumpy, weird, old guy, and he hasn’t been looking so good lately. Maybe the media will finally ask why Trump thinks Hannibal Lecter is a real person, is “great,” and is “late” (i.e., dead), or maybe they’ll spend more time dissecting the plodding insanity of his speeches.
And for the Republicans who built their presidential campaign around “Biden is old,” what happens when Democrats jiu jitsu the attack and pin it on the oldest presidential nominee in history?
In response to Biden’s announcement, Trump is flailing. He spent Sunday afternoon whining on his Truth Social website about Democrats pulling off their stunning switcheroo: “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again. Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the Fake News Media, knew he was not capable of running for, or being, President? Just askin’?”
Don’t worry, Republicans will soon levy their sexist, racist attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris. That is absolutely ahead of us.
But for years now, they have built a narrative that being old is a bad thing. Heck, they just wasted a whole week at their convention railing against Biden’s age.
Now, for the last three or so months of this campaign, they’ll get to wear that albatross around their neck.
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