Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks at Dutch Creek Farms in Northfield, Minnesota, November 1, 2023.
Here’s how the likely presidential field for 2024 is currently shaping up—actuarially. Joe Biden is 80 years old. Donald Trump is 77. Joe Manchin is 76. Jill Stein is 73. Cornel West is 70. Robert Kennedy Jr. is just 69, but he’ll turn 70 come January.
I have nothing against Social Security recipients. I’m one myself, about ten weeks older than Stein. Nor do I think that young people won’t turn out to vote for a senior citizen whom they find compelling, as their support for Bernie Sanders has clearly demonstrated.
Should a considerably younger candidate pop up among the seniors on next November’s ballot, I don’t for a moment think that that candidate’s age would be anything close to a decisive factor in that election. The economy, the right to an abortion, the threat of lawless authoritarianism, and the age of that oldest candidate would matter much more.
But it can’t be denied that a merely middle-aged candidate would stand out in that field. And in a very close election, which looks like where we’re headed, the relative youth, or at least non-senior-ness, of a plausible candidate could matter just enough to affect the outcome. I’m already on record saying that Joe Biden’s age—not his years as such, but his appearance, his manner, his voice, and his limited ability to make a compelling case for his otherwise compelling record as president—poses so great a challenge that the Democrats should nominate somebody else. I’m also repeatedly on record saying I think Biden has been a pretty terrific president, whose groundbreaking support for working-class interests and causes and whose fusion of environmental and labor reforms reorient the Democrats in the best possible way, both as policy and politics.
But listening last week to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s election night victory speech provided the opportunity to hear the case for Bidenesque policies and themes made by a more effective proponent than Biden himself. The contrast between message and messenger became painfully clear. That’s not to say that a Democratic governor could enter the Democratic primary process and somehow avoid the challenges posed by the same issues—immigration and inflation, to name just two—that have vexed Biden. It is to say that a Gretchen Whitmer or even a Beshear could highlight the issues on which Democrats have a clear advantage more effectively than Biden does when he highlights those same issues.
Every candidate schleps their own baggage into the race, of course, which is why a generic Democrat was trouncing Trump in last week’s polls while actual Democrats fared less well. (The New York Times swing-state poll was no one-off, by the way; a CNN national poll last week also showed Trump leading Biden by a similar margin, and a Los Angeles Times poll of California voters showed that even in the anchor state of American liberalism, more Californians disapproved of Biden’s tenure in office than approved of it—a rather stunning first in Golden State polling.) The public’s confidence in Biden is demonstrably sinking even as the public’s support for some core Democratic positions and their disapproval of Republican positions on those issues are rising.
Biden does have an ace in the hole, of course: his opponent. By avoiding the Republican primary debates, Donald Trump has largely succeeded in keeping his own frailties out of the spotlight. His speeches are still forceful but also increasingly incoherent. Of course, he’s always been somewhat incoherent, as free association veers into nonsense, but the problem is growing more pronounced. At a recent campaign event in New Hampshire, Trump spoke with glee about how his Justice Department would go after Biden once Trump reoccupies the White House. Pondering that for a moment, he added, “This is third-world country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent.’ And that means I can do that, too.”
I defy any debate team in America to run with that argument.
As the media focus more on Trump, he’s likely to become the object of more doubts about his own age-related capacities, though the sheer volume and momentum of his speech will still give him an advantage over Biden’s slower and softer delivery. (That Biden’s speech is sometimes more halting at least means he’s thinking about what he’s saying, which is an impression Trump seldom conveys.) Besides, the public has long been factoring incoherence into the Trump gestalt, so greater incomprehensibility isn’t necessarily fatal.
But the very fact that these are distinctions and factors we need to consider argues for a better advocate for Biden’s values and achievements than Biden himself. Besides which, having a relative young’un in a sea of septuagenarians won’t hurt.
