Former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, is “way too old” to assume the presidency for a second time “given the demands of the job,” pollster Nate Silver wrote Friday.
In a post to his Silver Bulletin blog, Silver wrote on Friday that while media attention on the candidates’ ages has dropped since President Joe Biden, 81, stepped out of the 2024 race in late July, similar pressure should be focused on Trump, who turned 78 in June. If he wins in November, Trump would be the oldest president in U.S. history to be elected, surpassing Biden’s age on Inauguration Day in January 2021 by a couple of months.
“Trump is 78 and is seeking the presidency until he’s 82,” Silver wrote. “That’s way too old, given the demands of the job. Considering the long history of old presidents seeking to hold onto power when they were clearly diminished…we should probably just have a Constitutional amendment that says a president can’t be older than 75 on Inauguration Day.”
After a rough debate performance in June against Trump, Biden, who turns 82 in November, faced pressure from within his own party to step aside as the Democratic nominee. Reports surfaced that the president had blamed the rough performance on his busy travel schedule in the weeks leading up to it, and some sources close to Biden claimed that he had signs of “cognitive decline.”
Biden and his campaign rebuked such reports, but the president was eventually pushed out, making way for 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris to assume the Democratic nomination in late July.
Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
As Silver reported Friday, the frequency of media coverage about the candidates’ ages has fallen significantly. In July, per Silver’s tracking, the number of New York Times articles that mentioned “age” along with Biden’s name peaked at 341 for the month. Similarly, the number of articles that mentioned “age” and Trump by the Times peaked at 273 during the same time frame. By mid-August, the frequency of such stories had dropped below 140 a month.
Silver wrote that he believes there should be more focus on Trump’s age and mental capacity but added that pressure should still be applied to Biden as well.
“He may not be a candidate for president anymore, but he’s the leader of the free world in a dangerous time facing multiple simultaneous crises from Ukraine to the Middle East,” he wrote. “How effective is he at handling these or if something even worse happens?”
Trump has been under pressure in recent weeks to be more transparent about his medical records as Election Day draws near. Last Saturday, Harris’ physician released a letter that the vice president maintains a healthy lifestyle and that her most recent physical in April was “unremarkable.”
Harris’ campaign released the report as a nudge to Trump who has been limited about what information he releases to the public regarding his health. A spokesperson for the former president’s campaign said last week that medical reports Trump has voluntarily released have found that he is in “perfect and excellent health to be Commander in Chief.”
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s campaign via email Friday for comment.
Silver also said on Friday that he sees “real movement” toward the former president in recent polling data, although the race between Harris and Trump remains incredibly close.
“Harris’s lead in national polls is down to 2.3 points from a peak of 3.5 on October 2,” Silver wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday. “The race remains a toss-up, but we’re at a point where we can be pretty confident this is real movement and not statistical noise.”
According to Silver, Harris is leading Trump 49 percent to 46.7 percent on average across national polling as of Friday. But per the pollster’s election model, Trump has a slightly higher chance (51.6 percent to 48.1 percent) of securing the necessary 270 Electoral votes for victory in November.
