Polling shows it's Trump, not Biden, who could be in peril over the age issue

Yet somehow this has been buried by the corporate media.

The Signorile Report is reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism. Thanks!

On Monday, The New York Times finally published a story about Donald Trump’s bizarre misstatements in recent weeks, which many of us in the progressive press, including my colleague Dean Obeidallah, have long noted are clear indications of mental decline. (It certainly shows that it’s become a story the corporate media can no longer ignore—even as it scrambles their narrative.)

Deep in the piece, the Times tells us about a “previously unreported finding in an August survey” from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

That poll noted that 43 percent of U.S. voters said both Trump and Biden were “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” But, the previously unreported finding, the Times explains, is that, “Among those voters, 61 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden, compared with 13 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.”

First off, as I have said and will continue to say, polling this far out regarding the general election means almost nothing, even as the corporate media continues to blow it up big.

But, keeping the media’s obsessive focus in mind, how the hell is there “previously unreported” anything when it comes to any poll? They’ve bombarded us with polling information ad nauseam, yet this particular datapoint—which counters the narrative that President Biden’s age could cost him in the election—was somehow lost?

In its story, the Times then reports on a similar finding in a Franklin & Marshall College poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania just last week:

According to the poll, 43 percent of Pennsylvanians said both men were “too old to serve another term.” An analysis of that data for The New York Times showed that Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump among those voters by 66 percent to 11 percent. Among all voters in the state, the two men were in a statistical tie.

Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall poll, tells the Times:

The age issue is one that, if Trump gets tarred with the same brush as Biden, it really hurts him.

So, if we were to go on this polling, the issue of age isn’t an issue for President Biden when it comes to who people will actually vote for. I and others have been saying this for a long time. The corporate media has for many months only reported on voters’ “concerns” about age regarding Biden but didn’t tell us if, in the end, people would make a determination that the issue would cause them to vote for the fascist who is hellbent on destroying democracy instead.

The polling the Times now references suggests that age isn’t a determining factor for people when it comes to President Biden. And yet, we have had months of corporate media reports—often spurred on by Republican politicians and MAGA extremists—pointing to alleged signs of the president’s mental decline based on a stumble here or a tripped-up word there, while he has given lucid, powerful speeches like the one he gave last month in Phoenix on the threat to democracy.

And they used their meaningless polling—while leaving out a key datapoint—to push the argument that the president’s age will hurt him. It has gotten to a point where Biden even now has a Democratic challenger, Rep. Dean Phillips, who’s launched a primary challenge to the president, ill-fated as it is, based solely on the issue of Biden’s age, claiming he actually has few policy differences with the president.

So now we finally get a story from the Times about Trump’s mental decline, after weeks of watching him claim he ran against former President Obama in 2016 (and claiming he is leading against Obama in the general election polls for 2024) and confusing George W. Bush and Jeb Bush—stating he ran in the GOP primary in 2016 against the guy who brought us into the Iraq War. Just last week, Trump, at a rally, lauded the authoritarian leader of Hungary, his buddy Victor Orbán, identifying him as “the leader of Turkey.” As the Times notes:

At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”

To be clear, I’m not saying that Trump’s age will actually be an issue with his base. These people are in a cult and will vote for Trump even if he fell into a coma. And again, all of this polling means very little this far out—and that cuts both ways, whether it be about Biden or Trump.

But the corporate media has been reckless in its promotion of polls about Biden’s age, obsessed with the issue while giving Trump a pass. They’ve actually shown us no evidence that the age issue is hurting the president when it comes to who people will choose as president, and they actually seem to have buried information that suggests it most certainly isn’t hurting him and could actually hurt Trump.

That’s not just a dereliction of duty by the corporate media; it appears more like willful ignorance, all to push a sensational narrative.