In a recent poll conducted exclusively for DailyMail.com, only 38 percent of likely voters for the 2024 election believe President Joe Biden will complete another four-year term alive.
This statistic underscores a potential scenario where Vice President Kamala Harris could assume the presidency by January 2029 if Biden secures reelection.
The poll found that 36 percent of likely voters think Harris might be president by the end of the term—mirroring the percentage that believes Biden will still hold the office.
These findings highlight concerns about the 81-year-old president’s age, which is expected to be a significant consideration for voters on November 5 as they choose the nation’s next commander in chief.
While former President Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican opponent, is just four years younger, he faces less skepticism among voters regarding his longevity in office.
J.L. Partners asked 1005 likely voters for their views on Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Only 38 percent said they were confident that Biden would survive four full years of another term
Some 36 percent of voters think Vice President Kamala Harris will be president by January 2029 if Biden is elected to another four-year term in November
More than half of the respondents expressed confidence in Trump’s ability to serve a full term, with only 34 percent expressing doubts.
Either way, the results show how Republicans and Democrats will have to weigh up not just their choice of president but also consider who is likely to step into the breach if ill health—or worse—incapacitates the leader of the free world.
‘Voters think Biden is too old, and they are not changing their mind,’ said James Johnson, cofounder of J.L. Partners, which conducted the poll.
‘The difficulty for Biden is that views of him are not shaped through events such as his State of the Union address—which people who had seen it felt was fiery—but through consumption of the hundreds of viral social media clips of Biden stumbling and slurring.
‘That solid perception that he is too old feeds through to a sense he is too weak, and it is a major problem for him going into November. Frankly, they do not think he is up to the job—and that makes his re-election a much harder task.’
Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term.
And he tackled the age question directly in his State of The Union address.
‘My fellow Americans,’ said Biden as he wound up to his conclusion, ‘the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are it’s how old our ideas are?
‘Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas.’
Biden answered questions about his age with a forceful performance as he set out his platform for the election during his State of the Union address to Congress earlier this month
Yet the most viral moment may have been an example of frailty, when he mispronounced the name of ‘Laken Riley,’ a women murdered by an illegal immigrant as ‘Lincoln Riley.’
He also frequently uses humor to try to defuse the issue.
‘I know it may not look like it, but I’ve been around a while,’ he said during the State of the Union.
But he was buffeted by a slew of negative headlines after a damning special counsel report that claimed, during hours of questioning, that he forgot the date on which his beloved son Beau died and that the president would come across as ‘an elderly man with a poor memory’ to a jury.
(When the transcript of the interviews was released, however, Biden’s performance was far better than the condensed report suggested.)
J.L. Partners polled 1000 likely voters from March 20 to 24 via landline, cellphone, SMS and apps. The results carry a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent
The results show Donald Trump maintains his four-point lead over Joe Biden, with a little over seven months to the November 5 presidential election
Trump has attacked Biden repeatedly as unfit for office because of his age. But he too has suffered from unforced errors and verbal gaffes at public events that some Republican say show his declining performance.
‘Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,’ said Trump said at a rally in Richmond, Virginia, earlier this month, muddling the current president with a Democratic predecessor.
For now, Trump has the upper hand. A separate DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners poll of 1000 likely voters found that the former president has maintained the four-point lead he has held since December.
The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
