Mr Biden and his allies have rejected anxieties about his age and mental acuity as unfair and inaccurate.
His campaign says its coalition will again rally around the president once it fully recognises that Trump could win back the White House. It also argues that Mr Biden faced age concerns in 2020 and still won.
Yet Mr Biden is now four years older, and it may be impossible to completely reassure voters about his age given the inexorable march of time.
The poll indicates that the worries about him are not only pernicious, but also now intertwined with how many voters view him.
Mr Calvin Nurjadin, a Democrat in Cedar Park, Texas, who plans to support Mr Biden in November, said he was unconvinced by politicians in his party who have publicly played up their direct observations of Mr Biden’s mental sharpness.
“You’ve just kind of seen the clips of, you know, he’s having memories onstage and, you know, during debate and discussion where he kind of freezes up a lot,” said Mr Nurjadin, who does data entry work. “Him being sharp and fit is not very convincing.”
Even though the country is bitterly divided and Republican voters have overwhelmingly negative views of Mr Biden’s age, Democrats do not appear to be more worried about the effects of time on Trump than on Mr Biden. Similar shares of Democrats said each man was too old to be effective.
The poll tried to understand in greater depth how voters thought about Mr Biden’s and Trump’s abilities.
The survey first asked if each man was too old to be effective. Voters who said yes were asked a follow-up question about whether that age was such a problem that Mr Biden or Trump was not capable of handling the job, a stronger measure that prompted voters to consider the candidate’s basic fitness for office.
Mr Shermaine Elmore, 44, a small-business owner in Baltimore, voted for Mr Biden four years ago, backing the Democratic candidate as he had in previous elections.
But he said he had made more money under Trump, blaming inflation and gas prices for his losses during the Biden administration. He planned to vote for Trump this fall.
Of Mr Biden, he said: “I don’t think he’s in the best health to make a decision if the country needs the president to make a decision.”
The New York Times/Siena College poll of 980 registered voters nationwide was conducted on cellular and landline telephones, using live interviewers, from Feb 25 – 28.
The margin of sampling error for the presidential ballot choice question is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points among registered voters. NYTIMES
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