American voters are broadly skeptical that President Biden is mentally fit to serve a second term, and most don’t think his presumed general election rival Donald Trump is mentally fit either, according to a Quinnipiac University poll published Wednesday.
In the survey, 64% of respondents said Biden was mentally unfit for another term, a bleak data point for the president in a poll where he nonetheless outperformed his topline numbers in many other surveys. Meanwhile, 51% of voters told the pollster they did not think Trump was mentally fit for a second term on Pennsylvania Ave.
The 81-year-old Biden — whose mental acuity has been under heightened scrutiny after Special Counsel Robert Hur‘s report this month characterized him as an “elderly man with a poor memory” — has pushed back on concerns about his cognizance and recall, and has shown no public signs of pulling back from his reelection campaign.
“I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden told reporters at the White House two weeks ago. “I put this country back on its feet.”
As Biden marches toward the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the 77-year-old Trump has been gliding to the Republican nomination while holding leads over the current president in public opinion polls.
Quinnipiac’s latest national poll was an outlier: Biden led Trump by 4 points, even as two-thirds of voters said they judged Biden to be too old to serve another full term in the White House.
Separately, an Economist/YouGov poll published Wednesday showed Biden a point behind Trump. Both Quinnipiac and YouGov are respected pollsters.
Many other surveys have shown Trump with larger leads over Biden.
In New York State, Biden led Trump by 12 points in a Siena College survey published Tuesday, underscoring the president’s recent struggles locally. In the 2020 election, Biden won New York by more than 23 points.
The Siena poll found more than 40% of New York voters saying they would prefer “somebody else” over Biden or Trump.
But the election is more than 250 days away, and public opinion on both candidates may shift markedly between now and November.
Biden’s campaign, seeking to rebut concerns that Democrats are unenthusiastic about the president’s reelection bid, has pointed to a surge in grassroots fundraising in January.
