Democrats successfully forced President Joe Biden out of the 2024 race, and with him, concerns over his mental fitness.
But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from litigating his age, even as Democrats feel freshly emboldened to level the same attacks against former President Donald Trump.
Republicans responded to Biden’s decision to step aside Sunday by calling on him to resign immediately.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for president, he is not fit to serve as president,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the main pro-Trump super PAC announced it would air commercials accusing Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s likely successor, of “covering up” his apparent cognitive decline.
The strategy is nearly identical to the one adopted after the president’s disastrous debate performance last month, which brought into the open a Democratic panic that Biden could not win after he appeared frail and struggled to complete sentences.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) will introduce a resolution Monday calling on Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment, just as Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) did following the debate.
On the other side of that mutiny, Republicans are left focusing on someone who will no longer be their opponent. Biden endorsed Harris shortly after announcing he would drop out, while most of the party has since coalesced around her.
Harris, 59, is almost 20 years younger than Trump and gives Democrats a chance to move past the age concerns against Biden.
“We have the vigor, we have the energy on our side,” Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) said on CNN while alluding to Harris’s background as a prosecutor. “She’s put prisoners and criminals behind bars.”
Some Democrats even accused Trump of being “too old” for office, as if to poke Republicans in the eye for lodging the same complaint about Biden.
“You’re comparing a 59-year-old now against somebody who’s almost 80,” said Steve Maviglio, a Democratic strategist in California. “I think it’s legitimate, just the way the criticisms of Biden were legitimate.”
It remains to be seen how and to what extent Democrats focus on Trump’s age. A third of voters believe he is too old to be president, compared to the two-thirds who felt the same way about Biden. At the same time, Trump remains active on the trail and has not demonstrated the mental decline seen with Biden.
But the upshot of Biden’s withdrawal is Republicans no longer have the same foil. They spent their convention this week portraying Trump as strong and Biden as “decrepit,” but they will now have to overhaul their campaign strategy.
“They’re gonna have to recalibrate that message. They’re gonna have to run against their record, as opposed to against the personality,” said Republican strategist John Feehery, who called the change in ticket a “clarifying moment” for the GOP.
That’s easier to do with Harris than Biden. She ran to Biden’s left in the 2020 Democratic primary for president, and her role as vice president has allowed Republicans to transfer all of Biden’s policy baggage to her, including his handling of the border.
Already, the Trump campaign has begun to attack Harris as Biden’s “border czar,” a reference to the early days of the Biden administration, when the president tapped her to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration.
But Republicans have not given up on trying to create an air of conspiracy around Biden’s exit from the race. In the days after the debate, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) accused the White House of “trying to hide the truth from the American people.”
He subpoenaed three Biden staffers while calling for a transcribed interview with the White House’s physician.
The resignation calls appear to be designed to keep the same pressure on the administration as Biden, who is recovering from COVID-19, remains out of public view 24 hours after his announcement.
“Expect to see nearly every House Republican demand Biden step down,” a senior GOP aide told the Washington Examiner.
With three months until the election, the likelihood of Biden resigning from office is almost zero, while it would take a grave medical episode for Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment.
However, the continued focus allows the House to tap into grassroots discontent over what they perceive as Democratic attempts to hoodwink the public about Biden’s mental state.
“It plays to their base,” said Maviglio.
Republicans have tried to weave Biden’s age into the broader critique of Harris on policy.
“As second in command and a completely inept border czar, Harris has been a gleeful accomplice — not only in the destruction of American sovereignty, security, and prosperity but also in the largest political coverup in U.S. history,” Johnson said in his statement. “She has known for as long as anyone of his incapacity to serve.”
But Feehery judged that Republicans would be well-served registering their complaints and moving on. Harris has liabilities apart from Biden, including her support for a bail fund that assisted protesters in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
“I think they should focus on Harris,” he said. “Define her early as someone who was very close to the BLM riots, who bailed out the BLM rioters, and who was supposed to fix the border, but she made the border worse.”
Maviglio called the emphasis on Biden’s age a sign of a “flailing campaign that doesn’t know how to focus now that the players have changed.” Trump himself continues to harp on Biden on social media, taunting him Monday morning with claims he isn’t aware he dropped out of the race.
The Democrats, for their part, are likely to keep abortion access as the centerpiece of their election pitch, with Harris seen as someone who can make the case more forcefully than Biden.
She embarked on a national “reproductive freedoms” tour in December and was the first vice president to visit a Planned Parenthood clinic in March.
Meanwhile, her career as a prosecutor and California’s attorney general could allow them to draw a sharper contrast with Trump’s recent hush money conviction.
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Trump’s age could be additional fodder now that the race is no longer a 2020 rematch. But Feehery noted the argument did not help Harris in her 2020 primary against Biden as he defeated a slate of younger Democrats.
“It didn’t work when they tried that against Biden when Kamala was running against Biden,” he said. “So, I find it hard to believe it’ll work against Trump.”
