Let Joe Biden Be Joe Biden: Voter Reactions To President Biden’s Events

Photo by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s no secret that the political world has been ablaze with talk about President Joe Biden’s age.

The 80-year-old incumbent Democrat has seen a slew of concerns from voters about his age, with a recent Wall Street Journal Poll showing 77% of voters saying Biden is too old to run for President.

Indeed, President Biden is slower, more quiet, and not as snappy compared to years past, as most appearances in front of a standing podium show a more subdued person than most Americans are accustomed to.

However, something changes when you put Biden in front of a campaign crowd and give him a portable microphone.

The octogenarian President moves to make wisecracks, becomes louder and prouder of his accomplishments, jabs at former president Donald Trump, and even jokes about his most vulnerable attribute.

When I watched Biden make a Labor Day stop in Philadelphia, PA, I was taken aback by his mannerisms and almost felt like I was watching a 2012 stump speech.

And I was not the only one who noticed this either.

I showed the video of Biden at the event to several of my colleagues and my peers around 25 years of age — many of them worried about his age and mental acuity.

Many seemed impressed with his cadence and energy at the Labor Day event.

“It reminds me of when he was Vice President,” one said on the condition of anonymity. “I want to see more of this Biden.”

To see if this was consistent, I conducted a focus group.

I showed two videos to a group of 50 voters who were in their early to mid-20s from different areas of Massachusetts.

These voters all expressed their intention to vote for President Biden in the election, but all expressed similar concerns about his age.

“He seems out of it,” one voter said. “I’ll vote for him, sure, but I dunno, I worry if he can handle four more years.”

The first was President Biden’s Labor Day stop; the other was a Medal of Freedom event at the White House.

I then asked them which video made them feel more confident about the President and if it changed their vote.

To my shock, all of them said the video of Biden at the rally was more energetic and made them feel more confident, using adjectives such as “lively” and “engaging” to describe his actions.

Meanwhile, the words they used to describe Biden in the second video consisted of the adjectives “slow,” “old,” and “unsure.”

“I was surprised to see how different he was in each video,” a voter told me.

While the focus group pales in comparison to high-quality polling, the results were consistent.

They all said Biden looked like he had more energy and fun campaigning outside the White House than doing formal events behind the podium.

So, if Biden can prove to some voters that he still has energy, why is the topic of his age becoming an unsolvable problem the campaign needs help fixing?

For many political watchers, the issue for Biden is not so much that he is old or has terrible political instincts, but rather that if he has one slip-up, it could ruin his campaign.

Some have even put the blame on Biden’s White House and campaign staff.

John Couvillon, the founder and CEO of JMC Analytics and Polling, said Biden’s team appears to have very little faith in the President’s political abilities. They need to take the risk of letting him out of the White House to prove his capabilities.

“I think he’s held back like an infant,” Couvillon said. “Let Joe be Joe.”

Others, such as Benjy Sarlin of Semafor, have made a point on Twitter that the campaign has barely started.

Biden so far has been building a campaign team that has been more diverse and younger than his 2020 team, signalling a possible acknowledgement that he needs to improve upon his margins with young lack and Hispanic voters.

Whether there is faith in Biden or not, media coverage of his age has turned into a never-ending deluge that the campaign and the White House seem to lack any initiative to stop.

Biden, meanwhile, appears to have baited interest in going to more events and getting out of D.C.

So perhaps there is truth to what Couvillon, Sarlin and the several voters I have talked to about Biden.

However, the only way to prove that is to let the President out more.