RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Harvard–Harris poll released last week asked registered voters: “Do you think Joe Biden is showing he is too old to be President or do you think he is showing he is fit to be president?”

Sixty-two percent of respondents — nearly two-thirds — said they thought Biden was too old, compared with just 38 percent who said they thought he had proved himself fit for the job.

If Biden, at the age of 79, is registering poll numbers like that in 2022, how much more will the issue of his age weigh on the minds of voters should he seek another term in 2024?

Americans will not merely have to be comfortable with the fitness of the man they vote for in 2024 — they will have to confident that he’ll remain fit to serve as president through January 20, 2029, when Biden would be 86 years old. Attacks on Ronald Reagan’s age obviously didn’t hurt him in 1984, but at the end of a second term Biden would be nearly a decade older than Reagan was when he left office at the age of 77.

Voters do not need to play the role of armchair psychiatrist to see that Biden has lost a step. Despite all the attempts in the mainstream media to recast Biden’s troubles speaking as a lifelong battle with a stutter, it is plain to anyone with eyes and ears that the president who now struggles to make it through a speech is not nearly as sharp as the vice president who debated Paul Ryan in 2012.

It’s far from clear that the issue of age will sink Biden if he runs again in 2024, but it is clear that Republican primary voters could do a lot to help protect Biden from age-related attacks if they nominated Donald Trump for a third time. Trump’s worst mental deficiencies are his erratic personality and his conspiratorial mindset, but he’s also very old: If he ran and won in 2024, he’d be 82 by the time his term ended in January 2029.

Both Biden and Trump are giving every public indication that they will indeed run in 2024, and there’s no sign that they are saying something different behind the scenes. As New York magazine’s Gabriel Beneditti reported last week, Biden “has said in private that he sees himself as the only thing standing between the country and the Trumpian abyss and has instructed his aides to redouble their planning for a rematch.”

The Harvard–Harris poll finds that Trump and Biden are the front-runners for their respective parties’ nominations in 2024, with the former registering 41 percent among Republican primary voters and the latter at 23 percent among Democratic primary voters. But the poll also makes it clear that the general electorate would like to avoid having an 86-year-old Biden (or, presumably, an 82-year-old Trump) in the Oval Office. Do primary voters really want to leave the country at large with that choice in November 2024? That is a question that potential primary challengers to both men may be asking a lot in 2023.