Just over one-third of American voters believe that 81-year-old President Joe Biden will survive a second term in office, a new poll has found. The poll results come as Biden, the oldest president in US history, struggles to overcome public concerns about his advanced age that have plagued his reelection campaign.
First reported by The Daily Mail, a survey by J.L. Partners discovered that only 38 percent of the American electorate is confident that Biden will still be alive, let alone functional, at the end of a hypothetical second term. If Biden’s 2024 reelection bid is successful, he would exit the White House in January 2029 at the age of 86. That is assuming he survives the full term: exactly one-third (33 percent) of respondents are not convinced he will.
Meanwhile, voter confidence in former President Donald Trump’s chances of survival was found to be a more respectable 54 percent. Though the Republican frontrunner is only four years younger than the incumbent, his mental and physical fitness has proven far more reliable since the last election. Only 21 percent of survey takers doubt that Trump will live long enough to complete a second term.
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According to the poll results, Vice President Kamala Harris is considered just as likely as Biden to be president in 2029 if their ticket wins in 2024, with both tied at 36 percent. Another 29 percent of respondents were either unsure or believed that another candidate will emerge to fill the job in the intervening time.
“Voters think Biden is too old, and they are not changing their mind,” said J.L. Partners co-founder James Johnson. “The difficulty for Biden is that views of him are not shaped through events such as his State of the Union address—which people who had seen it felt was fiery—but through consumption of the hundreds of viral social media clips of Biden stumbling and slurring.”
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“That solid perception that he is too old feeds through to a sense he is too weak, and it is a major problem for him going into November,” Johnson continued. “Frankly, they do not think he is up to the job—and that makes his re-election a much harder task.”
During the aforementioned State of the Union speech last month, Biden addressed the subject of his own age, stating that “the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old our ideas are.” However, several verbal missteps during and after the speech only served to undermine his point.
Biden has also recently been plagued by a series of negative headlines stemming from a Department of Justice investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents, which concluded that the president is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” That same report, compiled by Special Counsel Robert Hur, also found that Biden had misremembered details about his time as vice president, forgot the year of his son Beau’s death, and possibly lied about his “political origin story.”
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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