But whatever the reason, it’s clear that concerns about Biden’s age and mental capacity outweigh concerns about Trump’s stability — both now and when, as president, his behavior was the focus of voters’ attention.
It wasn’t like that before, but it is now.
The comparison of the two men’s intellectual abilities is also a bit off-base: polls often ask about the candidates’ ages and who is better on measures such as “mental health” or “emotional well-being.”
For example, in a CBS News/YouGov poll this weekend, 42 percent said only Trump has the “mental and cognitive health necessary to serve as president,” while 25 percent said only Biden does. Similarly, in a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, voters backed Trump 42-23 on “mental clarity.”
But it might be better to compare Biden’s age and mental fitness with Trump’s perception of stability. After all, that was his big negative as president: It wasn’t that Trump was old or mentally retarded, it was that his behavior was odd. A 2018 Washington Post/ABC News poll, for example, found that 47% of voters thought the “stable” part of “stable genius” didn’t apply to Trump. A Quinnipiac University poll found similar results: About half of Americans thought we had an unstable president.
Thinking about things in those terms brings things a little closer.
Perhaps the best recent poll on the subject was conducted by NBC News in April, which asked several questions gauging voters’ confidence in the candidates’ decision-making.
- When asked who would be better equipped to serve as president in terms of “mental and physical health,” people chose Trump by a 19-point margin (45-26).
- But when it came to “competent and effective,” Trump’s lead narrowed to 11 points (47-36).
- And when it came to the question of “ability to handle a crisis,” the results were much closer, with Trump leading by just four points (46-42).
Similarly, a March Gallup poll showed the candidates very close on several relevant measures: 56% rated them both “intelligent,” while Trump had a slight lead on “good judgment in a crisis” (45-40).
And a Fox News poll from last year showed a relatively small difference between the percentage of people who think Biden (38%) and Trump (42%) have the “judgment to function effectively as president.”
When voters’ criteria are age and the candidate’s acumen, or how acumen is displayed, Biden seems to be at a clear disadvantage, but when it comes to decision-making and judgment, Trump doesn’t have as big an advantage.
But that’s an advantage Trump didn’t have in 2020. The same NBC poll at the time showed voters favoring Biden roughly evenly on each of the three questions above. A Fox poll showed that 52% of voters in July 2020 said Biden had the judgement to do his job effectively, compared with just 42% for Trump. Now, Trump leads on all of those measures.
Perhaps most importantly, a higher percentage of voters expressed serious concerns about Biden’s age (81% said he is too old, according to an ABC poll) and mental fitness (more than six in 10 said he is mentally unfit for the job, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll) than expressed concerns about Trump’s stability and judgment (about half or more).
This isn’t just a matter of voters not having an up-to-date picture of Trump’s mental health, which has been widely reported before and will be available for voters to reassess in the coming months, starting with the first debate in a few weeks. But will the new revelations offset Biden’s shortcomings on this front? Polling history suggests probably not.
