WASHINGTON — In the end, facing a choice between a convicted criminal and someone who looked, walked and talked like an old man, Americans preferred the criminal.
In his single term in the White House, Joe Biden led the country out of a deadly pandemic, pushed through a $1 trillion boost to road and bridge construction, secured massive new investments into American semiconductor manufacturing and clean energy infrastructure and pulled together an international coalition to support Ukraine after its invasion by Russia.
None of it mattered.
“His age became an issue the second people realized he was running again,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who has conducted hundreds of focus groups of Republican, Democratic and independent voters in recent years. “They couldn’t believe it, based on how he seemed.”
“It baked in quickly, and it seemed to underpin everything else,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant who ran a pro-Biden super PAC in 2020 and 2024. “Even in focus groups, folks would sometimes acknowledge accomplishments, then go back to age.”
Since the arrival of live television broadcasts more than a half century ago, the skills needed to run for president have diverged ever more dramatically from those needed to actually be president. And at age 81, as he sought another four years, Biden, in the minds of too many voters, just didn’t look capable of the job, notwithstanding his achievements.
An ABC News poll in February 2024 found that 86 percent of Americans — including 73 percent of Democrats — believed Biden was too old to be president again.
Four months later, at a debate against Donald Trump, a weak and halting performance sealed that impression and finally led other Democratic leaders to pressure him to drop out as the nominee. He exited the race the following month and immediately endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who would go on to lose narrowly to Trump in November.
And so, Biden leaves office Monday with an approval rating in the mid-30s. His legacy, at least in the short term, will be turning over the White House to a convicted felon who only four years earlier had tried to end American democracy by remaining in power despite losing reelection — an act authoritarianism experts say meets the definition of a self-coup.
David Kochel, a Republican consultant who has never been a fan of Trump, said Biden’s refusal to admit he wasn’t up to a second term is ultimately why Trump is back.
“He started sunsetting at some point in that first year, and it’s been downhill ever since. I think it’s a massive scandal,” Kochel said. “He owns the Trump victory himself.”
United States of Amnesia
That Biden’s term will end this way may be a function of how he got the job in the first place. When primary voters consolidated behind him in late winter of 2020, it wasn’t necessarily because they loved him as a candidate or were enamored of his proposals. Rather, he was seen as Democrats’ best chance of defeating Trump, who after three chaotic years in office began his fourth by mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic — repeatedly downplaying its severity, for example, and promoting unproven drugs as cures.
It was Biden’s third run for the White House. He has never been viewed as a strong campaigner or a gifted orator. An appearance at a Las Vegas strip mall before the Nevada caucuses in February seemed to draw as many curious passersby as committed supporters. He wound up finishing a distant second in that contest.
But after he won resoundingly in South Carolina’s primary — where the largely Black voting base still held affection for him as vice president to Barack Obama, the first Black president — Biden was quickly seen as the perfect choice to take on Trump. He was a safe, older white man who could win over swing voters in the Rust Belt states who were souring on the then-president.
True, Biden was already 77 and would be oldest candidate in the Democratic field and would be the oldest president to take the oath of office. Yet he was trim and seemed in strong health, sometimes jogging to the stage at his events.
Democratic primary voters’ assessment proved correct, with Biden winning back Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania from Trump and adding Arizona and Georgia to boot.
Yet just weeks later, that image of vitality was shattered along with the bones in his right foot, when Biden injured himself while playing with one of his two German shepherds. The fractures put him in a boot for weeks — and in the months and years to come, contributed to his stiffening gait.
The days of jogging to a podium were over, as Biden took on an elderly man’s shuffle that seemed to worsen over time. After his stumbles ascending the stairs to Air Force 1 became fodder for right-wing media, Biden began using the smaller, built-in staircase near the bottom of the fuselage.
Accompanying his physical deterioration were more frequent verbal miscues. Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, has been prone to gaffes for years, but he more and more often misspoke reading from the teleprompter, mangling words or misusing them.
By the time he officially announced he was running for a second term, many voters could not believe he was serious.
“People assumed he was a one-term president,” said Longwell, who has opposed Trump since his first presidential run in 2016 and who supported Biden and then Harris in 2024. “Everyone brought up his age regardless of politics. Dems would talk about how nervous he made them when he walked and talked. They would reach out their arms as if to steady him.”
The polling suggested that independent voters and even elements of the Democratic coalition, like young and infrequent voters who had come out in 2020 to get rid of Trump, could not be counted on to back Biden’s reelection.
While Trump is only four years younger than Biden, voters haven’t held Trump’s age against him to the same extent. Others have seemed not to remember Trump policies that were unpopular at the time, like how tariffs he imposed in his first term had devastated farmers and brought on a mini-recession in manufacturing.
Even more important, most Republicans and many independent “low-information” voters bought into Trump’s assertions that the 2020 election really had been stolen from him, that he had had nothing to do with the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and that in any event, whatever violence had taken place was justified.
That storyline, soon adopted almost universally by elected Republican officials and pro-Trump media, upended the assumption early on by leaders in both parties that Trump’s actions leading up to and on that day had ended his political career.
And when pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and $5 trillion in stimulus spending, meant to avoid a deep recession, caused inflation to soar in 2022 and 2023, the blame fell entirely on Biden.
He argued accurately that the majority of that spending had occurred under Trump and that America’s recovery from the pandemic had been far more robust than that of other major economies. Voters were not interested in hearing it.
Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican consultant and Trump critic, had been urging that Biden drop his reelection bid pretty much from the time it was announced. He likened Biden’s age problem to a person suddenly sprouting antlers — that no matter what that person says or does, others will focus on the antlers.
“It was a combination of the two. Inflation makes them crazy because it hits them every day at the gas pump and the grocery store,” he said. “And the age thing makes them think he can’t do anything about it.”
President-ing while old
Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke with more than a year left in his second term. It was largely covered up by his doctor and the first lady.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down from a bout with polio, yet won an unprecedented four presidential elections with much of the public unaware, thanks to artful staging and a press corps that agreed not to photograph him in a wheelchair. He died in office just three months into that fourth term, also of a stroke.
Starting with the 1960 presidential debate between then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and then-Vice President Richard Nixon, though, the visual and performative aspects of the presidency became ever more important, culminating in 1980, with the election of a trained Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, to the White House.
While aides maintained that Biden was still sharp behind closed doors, there were outward signs that he no longer had the stamina he had earlier in his career. Fewer nighttime events appeared on his schedule and his public misstatements became more frequent.
Four decades earlier, Reagan, the consummate performer, in his second term was exhibiting signs of the Alzheimer’s diagnosis he shared with the nation six years after he left Washington. A U.S. senator from Florida who arranged a meeting with him to discuss the space shuttle program in the mid-1980s wound up chit-chatting about random other Florida matters — and only learned later that aides had neglected to write “space shuttle” on the three-by-five index card Reagan was handed at the start of the meeting. Without those cards, he was lost.
But Reagan never had to face an opponent or the voters again. Biden did, and stubbornly insisted on pushing ahead, at times arguing that he was best positioned to defeat Trump a second time.
That assertion cannot be tested, although polling last summer indicated he would have suffered a far bigger loss than the 1.6 percentage point defeat taken by Harris. It also cannot be known how a full-on Democratic primary season might have unfolded had Biden announced in 2022 that he would not run again. Incumbency is an enormous advantage in presidential elections — most incumbents in modern history have gone on to win a second term — and an open primary might have produced a nominee so scarred in that process as to guarantee a loss in November.
“Almost everyone assumed that Biden was the transitional president he promised to be. That meant one term and out. His decision to run again was foolish,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “And fatal to Democratic chances.”
In any event, Biden appears acutely aware Americans are not terribly fond of him at the moment. In his farewell address Wednesday from the Oval Office, he reminded viewers that the biggest accomplishments of his administration – new highways, new factories, lower drug prices for seniors — have only recently gotten started.
We Won’t Back Down
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“It will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said. “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”