DeSantis’s 45th birthday thrusts Trump and Biden age difference into spotlight
Julia Johnson
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Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) turned 45 years old on Thursday, putting the significant age difference between him and former President Donald Trump, 77, and President Joe Biden, 80, in the spotlight.
But while the public increasingly says it prefers candidates under the age of 75, that doesn’t necessarily translate into voter behavior. Additionally, Republicans’ concern over age tends to be applied to Democrats rather than GOP candidates.
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Ipsos Senior Vice President Chris Jackson pointed this out, noting, “Republican concern about the age of elected officials appear to be mostly limited to Democrats.”
Agreeing with this assessment, a political scientist at the University of South Carolina, David Darmofal, said Republican “concerns have largely been about President Biden’s age” rather than Trump’s.
Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy pointed out that Trump and Biden have a “mere three year age difference.”
But this isn’t to say Republicans don’t care about age, according to pollster Doug Usher. Instead, he said, GOP voters “are holding two things in their head at once: They would prefer to have a candidate that is younger than 77, and they prefer Trump over DeSantis.”
“In recent Reuters/Ipsos polling, we found that Republicans were almost three times more likely to agree ‘Joe Biden is too old to work in government’ than to say the same about Donald Trump,” Jackson explained.
He further said the data suggest age is not likely to play a significant role in the Republican primary.
According to Darmofal, several Republican competitors to Trump, including DeSantis, have looked to contrast themselves with Trump based on his advanced age relative to their own. But “so far these contrasts have not been effective.”
DeSantis’s 45th birthday isn’t something he expects to change this. “Trump’s opponents are likely going to need a different line of criticism against him if they wish to reduce his significant lead over them and win the nomination,” he said.
Polling from George Washington University additionally revealed that, despite Trump’s age, Republican voters believe that his physical health and mental soundness are intact.
“Only 13.2 percent said Trump did not have the physical health to serve effectively and only 14.6 percent said he did not have mental soundness to serve effectively,” Director of the Political Management Master’s Program Todd Belt said. “Therefore, any sort of attack on Trump’s age, either directly or by comparison, is likely to fail in the Republican primaries.”
This comes as both Trump and Biden, the two candidates favored to be the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees in 2024, respectively, face renewed scrutiny over their age. A recent poll found 77% believe Biden is too old to serve another term as president effectively, and while less said the same about Trump, more than half agreed that he is also too old to do so.
Democrats were more uniform in saying both Trump and Biden are too old. But Republicans were significantly more likely to consider Biden too old and not Trump.
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In an interview for Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show, Trump said he didn’t think Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, was too old to run for president again. Instead, he claimed, Biden is “grossly incompetent.”
Trump explained that people don’t necessarily have to be old in order to be incompetent, adding that he also knows people in their 80s who are “sharp as a tack.”