WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Americans actually agree on something in this time of raw discord: Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president in a second term. Only a few years his junior, Donald Trump raises strikingly less concern about his age.
But they have plenty of other problems with Trump, who at least for now far outdistances his rivals for the Republican nomination despite his\u00a0multiple criminal indictments. Never mind his advanced years \u2014 if anything, some say, the 77-year-old ought to grow up.
A new poll from\u00a0The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research\u00a0finds much of the public oddly united in sizing up the one trait Biden cannot change.
The president has taken to raising the age issue himself, with wisecracks, as if trying to relax his audiences about his 80 trips around the sun.
Age discrimination may be banned in the workplace but the president\u2019s employers \u2014 the people \u2014 aren\u2019t shy about their bias.
In the poll, fully 77% said Biden is too old to be effective for four more years. Not only do 89% of Republicans say that, so do 69% of Democrats. That view is held across age groups, not just by young people, though older Democrats specifically are\u00a0more supportive of his 2024 bid.
In contrast, about half of U.S. adults say Trump is too old for the office, and here the familiar partisan divide emerges \u2014 Democrats are far more likely to disqualify Trump by age than are Republicans.
What\u2019s clear from the poll is that Americans are saying out with the old and in with the young, or at least younger.
Democrats, Republicans and independents want to sweep a broad broom through the halls of power, imposing age limits on the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court. In all about two-thirds of U.S. adults back an age ceiling on candidates for president and Congress and a mandatory retirement age for justices.
Specifically, 67% favor requiring Supreme Court justices to retire by a certain age, 68% support age ceilings for candidates for House and Senate, and 66% support age ceilings for candidates for president.
With elders mostly running the show and the Constitution to contend with, don\u2019t expect that to happen any time soon.
Even so, the survey suggests\u00a0lots of people across political lines\u00a0are open to seeing a younger face, a fresher one, or both, capture the public imagination.
Among them is Noah Burden, a 28-year-old communications consultant in Alexandria, Virginia. Despite a clear preference for Biden over Trump, he wishes the top contenders for the presidency were closer to his generation.
\u201cThey\u2019re too old overall,\u201d Burden said. That older generation represents \u201ca sense of values and sense of the country and the world that just isn\u2019t accurate anymore. It can be dangerous to have that view.\u201d
Similarly, Greg Pack, 62, a past and possibly future Trump voter in Ardmore, Oklahoma, wishes Biden and Trump would both move along.
\u201cJust watching and listening to Biden it\u2019s pretty self-evident he is not what he was,\u201d said Pack, a registered nurse.
Trump? \u201cHe is a lot sharper but at the end of his term, who knows?\u201d Pack said, contemplating January 2029. \u201cI\u2019m just ready for someone younger.\u201d He\u2019s had about enough of a man who is \u201call about himself\u201d and is \u201cwearing his indictments like a badge of honThe AP-NORC survey went beyond posing questions and presenting choices. It also had a word association exercise, asking people to offer the first word or phrase that comes to mind at the mention of each man.
The answers underscored how age is a particular drag for Biden across party lines, even when people aren\u2019t prompted to think about that, and how Trump largely escapes that only to draw disdain if not disgust on other fronts.
In those visceral responses, 26% mentioned Biden\u2019s age and an additional 15% used words such as \u201cslow\u201d or \u201cconfused.\u201d One Republican thought of \u201cpotato.\u201d Among Democrats, Biden\u2019s age was mentioned upfront by 28%. They preferred such terms over \u201cpresident,\u201d \u201cleader,\u201d \u201cstrong\u201d or \u201ccapable.\u201d One who approves of his performance nevertheless called him \u201csenile.\u201d
Only 3% in the survey came up with \u201cconfused\u201d as the first descriptor for Trump, and a mere 1% used \u201cold\u201d or the like. Instead, the top words were those like \u201ccorrupt\u201d or \u201ccrooked\u201d (15%), \u201cbad\u201d and other generally negative terms (11%), words such as \u201cliar\u201d and \u201cdishonest\u201d (8%), along with \u201cgood\u201d and other generally positive comments (8%).
Why the divergence between the two on public perceptions of their age?
\u201cBiden just seems to be very compromised by age-related conditions,\u201d said Eric Dezenhall, 60, a corporate scandal-management consultant who has followed Trump\u2019s career and worked in Ronald Reagan\u2019s White House. \u201cEven people who like him see him as being frail and not altogether \u2018there.\u2019\u201d
\u201cWhatever Trump\u2019s negatives are, I don\u2019t think most people see them as being related to being disabled in an age-related way,\u201d he said. \u201cIn fact, the more you throw at him, the more he seems like a ranting toddler. Disturbing, sure, but elderly? Not necessarily. Trump has been ranting this way for almost eight decades, and it always drives him forward.\u201d
For Diego Saldana, 31, it hits close to home when he see Biden fumbling some words or taking halting steps.
\u201cI see all the symptoms my grandpa had,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t be ruling a country\u201d that way. His granddad now is 94. Saldana supports Trump despite hesitancy over the criminal charges against him.
Eric Colwell, 34, an audit manager in Sacramento, California, came up with \u201cold\u201d for Biden and \u201cincompetent\u201d for Trump as his first-impression words. An independent who leans Democratic, he sounded a little embarrassed on the phone that the U.S. can\u2019t do better than these two.
\u201cSheer optics,\u201d he said. \u201cOlder gentlemen. You want your leaders, from a visual standpoint, to be spry and energetic. And we tend to fall short.\u201d
He views Trump, with all his hand gestures and animation, as \u201ca larger figure, a little more lively, just his personality. That gives him that energetic appearance.\u201d But Colwell is certainly not going there.
\u201cBiden was a good step to steady the water,\u201d he said. \u201cBiden is more representative of the status quo and normalcy and that\u2019s probably what drew everyone initially to him\u201d after the tumult of the Trump presidency.
\u201cNow you have a return to stability. But in terms of moving forward and having any measurable change on my generation, we\u2019re probably going to need younger leadership.\u201d
Alyssa Baggio, 32, is a Democratic-leaning independent in Vancouver, Washington, who works as a recruitment specialist for a homebuilder. She thought Biden was too old for the presidency before he started it. She\u2019s convinced of it now and open to voting next year for someone else, just not Trump.
\u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s done a terrible job in office,\u201d she said of Biden, \u201cbut I think that\u2019s more because, as opposed to Trump, he surrounds himself with more experienced and logical people.\u201d
Not that she places great value in experience, except in foreign affairs. \u201cD.C. is a swamp,\u201d she said, \u201cand the more experience you have, the more you sink into the swamp.\u201d
Said Jose Tapia, 33, a tech-company videographer in Raleigh, North Carolina, \u201cThere\u2019s got to be a multitude of younger people who are also super qualified. There\u2019s no fresh faces at all.\u201d
Older Democrats are less negative than younger ones on Biden\u2019s decision to run again. In the poll, only 34% of Democrats under 45 want him running for reelection, compared with 54% of those older. Still, about three-quarters of younger Democrats say they\u2019ll at least probably support him if he\u2019s the nominee; others did not commit to that.
All of this is dispiriting to S. Jay Olshansky, a public-health professor and aging expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He thinks age, when sizing up a presidential candidate, is no more relevant than eye color and the public\u2019s focus on it shortchanges the gift of wisdom and experience.
\u201cIt\u2019s sort of the classic ageism that we\u2019ve been battling for the last 50 years,\u201d he said. \u201cThe age of the individual is irrelevant. It\u2019s the policies that they bring to the table that are important. And the number of times around the sun just doesn\u2019t cut it as an important variable at all.\u201d
From observing both men from afar and examining their medical records, Olshansky regards Biden and Trump as likely \u201csuper agers\u201d despite signs of frailty from Biden and Trump\u2019s excess weight.
\u201cBiden is likely to outlive Trump because he has fewer harmful risk factors and he does exercise quite notably, whereas Trump does not,\u201d he said. But overall, \u201cthey\u2019re both functioning at a very high level.\u201d
\u201cIf you don\u2019t like what they say,\u201d he added, \u201cit\u2019s not because of how old they are. It\u2019s because you don\u2019t like what they say.\u201d
or,\u201d but if that\u2019s who it takes to defeat Biden, so be it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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