With less than a year to go until the 2024 elections, it’s increasingly looking like the electoral season will be an uphill battle for the Democratic Party.
For starters, President Joe Biden, the face of the party and who’s running for reelection, turned 81 years old on Monday. If re-elected, he’ll be 82 years old when his second term begins and 86 years old at its end, making him the oldest serving president by just under a decade.
And while he’s downplayed the role his advanced age could have on his ability to lead, polling’s revealed that more than three-fourths of US adults think he’s simply too old for another four years in the White House.
As Politico recently reported, Biden’s age has already begun to affect how he operates. The publication said that some of those around the president have advocated for him to walk shorter distances and ditch his dress shoes for more comfortable ones, sometimes sneakers, to lower the risk of him falling.
He’s also begun using Air Force One’s shorter staircase when exiting the plane just months after he tripped and fell over a sandbag at a US Air Force Academy graduation in July.
Biden’s age, along with how voters feel about his handling of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, has led him to fall behind former President Donald Trump in NBC News’ polls for the first time, a problem that could be exacerbated among younger voters.
NBC News isn’t the only pollster to show Biden trailing. A poll released in early November by the New York Times and Siena College also showed Trump leading the Democratic president in five of six battleground states.
Biden will also likely be facing off against more than just Trump in the upcoming presidential election after Robert F. Kennedy Jr split from the Democratic Party in early October after failing to gain enough support in early polls. Kennedy’s now running as an independent, where there’s a chance he could siphon off much-needed Democratic voters from Biden who feel maligned by the current president.
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