My theory for why Joe Biden’s age matters so much

I was talking to a group of people on Sunday with an average age well into the 80’s and we were talking about why there’s so much more focus on Joe Biden’s age than Donald Trump’s.  In the course of the discussion I hit upon a theory that I really think may explain a lot of this.  It’s his voice.  Not the words. Not the occasional nonsense.  Not the occasional really dumb mistakes.  Because, please, Trump has all of these things in spades.  It’s literally the auditory quality of Biden’s voice.  It’s weak and enervated and really sounds like an old person who is in poor condition.  Just compare it, for example, to Bernie Sander’s much stronger, more robust voice.

The thing is, though, by about every other measure of Biden’s age, he’s in great shape for 81. Yes, he makes some occasional embarrassing errors, but, for the most part, he really is physically and cognitively in good shape (seriously, watch this and argue otherwise).  Honestly, the quality of his voice just seems to have aged particularly poorly.  But that’s the reality of how we experience Biden in his public performance of the job.  And the public performance, like it or not, is an important part of the modern presidency.  

I would love to do an experiment where you de-age Biden voice with AI tools and see how voters respond to clips, versus his actual voice.  I suspect the results would be very telling.  Yes, Biden has plenty of verbal slips, but so do lots of politicians.  I’m not quite sure what the technology is for something like this, but damn would I love to do some good social science research on this.

Until then, it’s just supposition and anecdote.  I tried to see if any gerontologist or vocal expert had weighed in on his voice, but I couldn’t find anything.  I did find this NBC article which asks why Biden seems so much older than Trump.  And, guess what…

“Trump just comes off as a much younger person,” said Renee King, a two-time Trump voter in Mondamin, Iowa, who is undecided for 2024. (King declined to give her age.) “Just the way he speaks, the way he walks. Just everything he does.”  …

“When I listen to him speak publicly, I kind of hold my breath sometimes,” she said. “But you know, he’s the guy we’ve got, and … I don’t think it’s such a bad thing.”