Earlier this year, Democrats were outraged that Republicans — and the media — were focusing on Joe Biden’s advancing age and declining acuity. He’s fine, they insisted. It’s all partisan propaganda. The accusations are unfair.
No, they were not unfair. Biden’s disastrous debate performance clearly demonstrated that he was too old and feeble to run for a second term, let alone serve another four years. But now the age issue has turned against Donald Trump, who is 78 today and would turn 82 in office, should he win a second term. Kamala Harris, 18 years his junior, is now calling Trump “increasingly unstable and unhinged,” and her charges are well-formed and well-founded.
Just imagine what Republicans would be saying if Biden — or Harris, for that matter — stopped talking at a campaign rally and swayed silently to musical interludes for a full 39 minutes. Or decided that the voters of Pennsylvania, the nation’s most pivotal state, needed to a hear a salacious (and obviously envious) encomium to golfer Arnold Palmer’s sexual equipment.
Gaga, the GOP would have screamed. A nut case. Or as Harris’ running mate Tim Walz said of Trump’s musical meanderings, “It was strange, but if this was your grandfather, you would take the keys from him.”
We all know folks who are decrepit at 60, and others who are dashing at 80. But the problem with Trump’s age is not just his competence, it’s his character. As he grows older, is his judgment deteriorating and self-control declining?
Democrats think so, and they see that frailty as a key to victory. “There are very few voters left who haven’t decided who to vote for or whether to vote at all, but there’s enough of them to decide the election,” Harris adviser David Plouffe told online journal Puck.
The campaign’s research, he added, reveal this crucial finding: “People are, like, (Biden was old), but Trump is really old, too. And he seems like he’s losing his way, he doesn’t make a lot of sense, and that worries us. So for us, that can’t just be something we all laugh at. We’ve got to raise the stakes: Do you really want this unstable person making decisions about our economic policy and health care policy and foreign policy?”
Put this argument another way: The polling firm YouGov asked voters if a president should serve as a role model for young people, and 4 out of 5 said yes, but only 1 in 3 described Trump that way. In a Pew Research survey, 53% called Harris a “good role model,” but only 34% applied that label to Trump.
Democrats are aiming the age issue at a small but potentially potent group: moderate Republicans, mainly college-educated women living in the suburbs of swing states, exactly the voters who supported former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley against Trump. In all, she received 19.7% of the primary vote, or almost 4.4 million ballots, and in some critical targets she did even better: 30% in Nevada, 26% in Michigan, 23% in North Carolina.
The core of Haley’s message was straight and simple: Trump lacks character, he’s dangerous, you can’t trust him. As Haley said in one campaign speech: “I agree with a lot of his policies, but the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. We have too much division in this country, and too many threats around the world to be sitting in chaos once again.”
Haley’s warning closely resembles the pitch made by Liz Cheney, the former Republican lawmaker turned Trump critic, as she campaigned with Harris in Wisconsin: “In this moment, there are millions of good and honorable people who Donald Trump has just fundamentally betrayed. The decision to give somebody the power of the presidency means that you’re handing someone the most awesome and significant power of any office anywhere in the world, and you have to choose people who have character, choose people of good faith.”
“It’s not a fool’s errand,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told The New York Times about the Democrats’ strategy. He estimated that 10% to 12% of his party are Never Trumpers and added: “Those folks aren’t going to vote for Trump. The question is whether they skip the presidential ballot or whether they vote for Harris.”
Will these voters ask about Trump the same valid question that torpedoed Biden: Is he too old for the job, not just today, but four years from now? If they answer yes, Harris still has a fighting chance.