A large majority of US voters believe 81-year-old president Joe Biden and his primary Republican rival, 77-year-old Donald Trump, are too elderly to serve another term in office, a new survey by ABC News and market research company Ipsos has found.
According to the poll, which was conducted last week and involved a representative sample of 528 US voters, 86% of respondents said Biden should not run for a second term because of his age. Of that number, 27% believed only Biden – who is already the oldest US president in history – is too elderly, while 59% insisted that both he and former President Trump are too old. The Republican frontrunner was considered to be too old to run by 62% of respondents.
The survey also found a “large difference” across the political divide on how voters view their party’s nominees. As many as 74% of Democratic voters reported that Biden was too old to serve, while only 35% of Republicans shared that sentiment about Trump. As for independents, 91% said Biden was too old and 71% had the same opinion of Trump.
ABC’s poll results follow a similar survey published by NBC News one week previously, which showed that three-quarters of voters, including half of Democrats, said they were concerned about Biden’s mental and physical health.
A report last week from US Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” when ruling that he should not face charges for mishandling classified documents. The 345-page report revealed failures in Biden’s recollection of events, claiming that he could not remember when he had served as US vice president or when his son Beau had died.
Responding at a press conference, Biden vehemently denied assertions that he is unable to recall key events, insisting to journalists that his memory “is fine,” and telling them to “take a look at what I’ve done since I became president.”
However, several minutes later during the same press conference, Biden mistakenly called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the leader of Mexico. The gaffe followed several others by the US president in recent weeks, including when he misnamed French President Emmanuel Macron as Francois Mitterrand, and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as Helmut Kohl. Both Mitterrand and Kohl have been dead for years.