Who was fooled by the Biden decline cover-up? Not the voters

Despite a recent outpouring of new books about Biden’s condition as he aged in the White House, including Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which includes the wheelchair report, this cover-up was much less successful. 

Millions of voters saw Biden’s age-related decline in real time and were quicker to say so than many journalists who covered him daily, including some now reporting on or even authoring books chock-full of the gory details.

There was a partisan slant to how many of these voters viewed a possible rematch between two presidents born in the 1940s. A Pew Research Center poll of adults conducted in April 2024 found that 48% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters thought Biden’s age got too much media attention, while 12% believed it received too little. 

By contrast, 48% of Republicans and Republican-leaners thought Biden’s age was getting too little attention and 14% said it was getting too much. Those numbers are almost exactly reversed when respondents were asked about President Donald Trump, then nearing the end of his four-year hiatus from the Oval Office. 

But the same pollster found a steady drop in voters who viewed Biden as “mentally sharp” long before his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate with Trump. Just 33% thought Biden was mentally sharp in April 2023, according to Pew. That was long before the debate or special counsel Robert Hur’s report that said a jury would view the then-president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Pew respondents’ perception of Biden’s mental sharpness peaked at 53% early in his term. But from 2020 to 2024, it was usually below 50%. It declined all the way to 24% after the debate. For Trump, 50% in 2020 was the low point in the poll’s findings about his mental sharpness, with that number rising to 58% after the 2024 debate with Biden.

An ABC News-Ipsos poll released in February 2024, some four months before the debate, found 86% of Americans thought Biden was too old to serve another term as president. This included most Democrats. A majority, 59%, said both Biden and Trump were too old.

A New York Times-Siena College poll in March 2024 found that a majority of Biden 2020 voters thought he was too old to be effective. As far back as the summer of 2022, that pollster had results showing 94% of Democrats under 30 wanted their party to nominate someone other than Biden for president in the next election. 

FiveThirtyEight’s Kaleigh Rogers wrote nine days before Biden dropped out that the debate “didn’t suddenly thrust Biden’s age into the spotlight for most Americans the way it seemingly did for Democratic Party elites.”

“Though polls of the presidential election have moved toward former President Donald Trump,” she added, “answers to specific questions about Biden’s age haven’t changed much.”

One pollster argued at a presentation in Washington, D.C., weeks before the debate that concerns about Biden’s age erased his competence advantage over Trump in the data.

Anecdotally, there was a spectrum of opinion about Biden’s age. Some thought he was already too old to be president before he decided to run for reelection. Others questioned whether he would still be fit to serve at 86, which is how old he would have been if he completed a second term. People might think he was slowing down without concluding he had dementia or a serious medical problem.

TO MANY IN MEDIA, BIDEN AGE STORIES SOUNDED TOO CONSERVATIVE TO BE TRUE 

Some of the press skepticism about Biden’s age worries, which reporters often treated as right-wing mis- or disinformation in conjunction with his team’s “cheap fakes” narrative about video footage of the president, was likely in response to maximalist claims about his health and mental acuity. (Though it should be noted that some of the books coming out now contain reporting moving closer to those claims.)

But the desire to maintain access to Biden and not do Trump any “but her emails”-style favors aided a cover-up that only fooled the people who were paid to see through it and Democrats who wanted to be fooled.