Jonathan Bernstein: “There’s a lot of babble out there about this — a lot of false claims that he’s sharply declined cognitively — but putting that aside, there are two ways to look at the fact that he will turn 80 in November. One is that as long as Biden is unpopular, everything about him is going to be interpreted as a negative, including his age. If he was at 60% approval instead of falling a bit below 40%, the age story would be that he is defying it and thriving.”
“But yes, Biden is very old for the presidency, and even if it’s not affecting him in any serious way right now, there’s no guarantee that it won’t next month or next year. Let alone the four years that a second term would give him. And the truth is that not only was nominating Biden in 2020 a risk for Democrats, so was nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — she’ll turn 75 this fall, in what would have been the second year of her second term — just as it was a bad risk for Republicans to nominate Donald Trump, who just turned 76, in 2016 and 2020. Once those candidates are nominated, party voters have little choice but to vote for them, but the parties shouldn’t do it.”
