In new polling from Bloomberg and Morning Consult, 52 percent of registered voters across a series of electoral battleground states say that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is “too old” for the nation’s top job.
Only five percent said the same about Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Most of the remaining respondents instead said that neither of the two major party presidential nominees were “too old” for the White House — leaving Republicans squarely on the losing end of the age question after the withdrawal in July of President Joe Biden from this year’s race for president.
Biden was expected to be Democrats’ pick for this year’s election but stepped aside amid questions about his own advanced age, endorsing Harris. And all of that left Trump as, by far, the oldest major party candidate in the election this year after Republicans expended significant energy going after Biden’s age.
Biden is continuing to publicly support Harris as this year’s general election rapidly approaches. He appeared alongside her on the campaign trail, and he also spoke in her favor at the Democratic National Convention held last week in Chicago.
Biden’s speech upended any imagined possibilities of a scenario that Trump was talking about where the incumbent tried to get back the Democratic nomination after all, which Trump’s claimed was passed to someone else in a “coup,” though Biden himself withdrew. There has been no public indication of any of the claimed animosity from Biden that Trump has repeatedly pointed to.
Meanwhile, Harris and Trump are headed towards a general election debate planned for next month with ABC News, though there’s been lingering uncertainty about whether the candidates’ microphones would be left active when it’s not their turn to speak. Harris “wants the American people to see an unfettered Donald Trump, because that’s what we’re going to get if he becomes president again,” said Ian Sams, an advisor for the campaign.
