Seventy-seven percent of Americans say President Biden would be too old to be effective if he were reelected in 2024, according to a new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll.
Sixty-nine percent of Democrats said Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a hypothetical second term, is too old to be effective for another four years. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans said the same.
Biden became the oldest president to take the oath of office when he was sworn-in in January 2021.
Meanwhile, only about half of Americans said 77-year-old former president Donald Trump is too old for office.
Across party lines, Americans said they would want to see age limits imposed on on the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court, the survey found. Sixty-six percent said they would support age limits for presidential candidates, 68 percent would support age limits for Congress and 67 percent would support a mandatory retirement age for justices.
The poll, which was conducted between August 10 and 14, has a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has proposed mental competency tests for lawmakers over the age of 75.
Last month, she reiterated her call for a “new generation” of leaders during an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation.
Haley said it’s time for the GOP to move on from Trump and added: “What I am saying about Mitch McConnell, Dianne Feinstein, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, all of them: know when to walk away.”
“They are watching Biden right now. You see what happened with McConnell, you see what happened with Feinstein,” she added, referring to the Senate minority leader’s health scare in which he froze during a press conference.
Feinstein, a 90-year-old senator from California, has also been at the forefront of the conversation about age and political leadership after she took an extended break from the Senate due to an illness.
“We’ve got to stop electing people because we like them and they’ve been there a long time. That’s actually the problem. You need to have term limits, because we need new ideas, new solutions. We’ve got to have a new generation,” Haley said. “I hit Republicans and Democrats. We are $32 trillion in debt. We’re having to borrow money just to make our interest payments. I would love to say Biden did that to us. But Republicans did that to us, too.”
“We have huge issues that need new solutions. We need new generational leaders. We appreciate your service. We appreciate what you’ve done. But this is why we will fight for term limits,” Haley concluded.