Concerns about President Joe Biden’s age certainly do not appear to be going away in the wake of a politically damaging report from a special counsel.
On Sunday, an ABC News/Ipsos poll found a whopping 86% percent of Americans believe Biden is too old to serve another term.
The outlet noted that number includes 59% of Americans who think the 46th president and former President Donald Trump are both too old, and 27% who think just Biden is too old.
Latest ABC poll: 86% think Biden is too old to serve another term. pic.twitter.com/0IT65CVUGm
— Ford O'Connell (@FordOConnell) February 11, 2024
By contrast, 62% of respondents think Trump, 77, is too old.
Seventy three percent of Democrats say Biden is too old, while just 35% of Republicans say the same of the former president.
Meanwhile, 91% of independents think Biden is too old, and 71% say Trump is as well.
The poll was conducted Feb. 9-10, and came after Special Counsel Hur released a report on his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
He declined to recommend charges against the president, even though investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
Still, the report included several damaging sections. One portion described Biden as a “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Investigators also believed, “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” the report added.
Hur’s report also claimed Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Biden’s team has pushed back on the portion of Hur’s report that focused on the president’s memory, saying, “We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate. The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old event.”
Despite, Hur’s conclusion about Biden’s mental state, the ABC News poll found 38% of Americans think Biden should have been charged with a crime.
