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The almost 40 minutes of Donald Trump standing on a stage near Philadelphia, calling out a playlist and dancing like a bozo uncle at a wedding became easy fodder for meme-makers, late-night hosts, and the former President’s avowed haters. But it also provided an opportunity—albeit a potentially perilous one—for his rival looking to keep him out of the White House.
Kamala Harris and her campaign seized on the oddball incident. “Trump appears lost, confused, and frozen,” the @KamalaHQ account posted on X with a clip from the event. Harris piled on, sharing that post from her own account with the added jab, “Hope he’s okay.” Trump’s mental acuity has long been one of those persistent unknowns—particularly given his refusal to release his medical records. Monday’s event, which started as a policy-based Q&A session with North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and became a dance party after two attendees required medical attention, was the latest moment in which those murmurs grew into a roar that could not be ignored.
But there’s a risk here, and one Democrats would do well to take seriously. Yes, if the 78-year-old Trump wins a second term, he would eventually become the oldest person ever to be President. But also worth remembering is this: Close to two-thirds of voters are expected to be over the age of 45 this fall, and one-in-four are slated to be 65 or over. It’s one thing to go after someone’s potential capacity to do the job and it’s quite another if it looks like straight-up ageism. And, at the moment, Harris’ approach could alienate some voters who view it as more like the latter.
Once 81-year-old Joe Biden decided in July that he would not seek another term as President, Democrats clearly found potential advantage here. With 59-year-old Harris leading the party, Democrats were no longer dragging around the past-the-prime skepticism. Instead, what had been one of Biden’s most persistent slags suddenly got shifted to Trump, who is just three years his junior. By contrast, Harris cuts a vigorous figure who stands to make history, clearly has an ability to get under Trump’s skin, and has performed exceptional CPR on what had been a languishing Democratic Party.
The risk here, though, is one that is not entirely new to Harris’ campaign team in Wilmington, Del. Some of them were hands on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign against a 71-year-old John McCain. The top Obama strategists in 2008 were crystal clear in their edict: erratic and confused were acceptable ways for the campaign to describe McCain, but ancient and expired were not.
The cryptic effort was a constant grind on the McCain team, which openly accused Obama’s orbit of ageism. Obama’s campaign nevertheless continued with coded terms; both John Kerry and Susan Rice deployed “confused” to describe McCain. To Obama’s circle, they were not going to set aside what they saw as legitimate questions about McCain’s capacity to do the job just to appease those crying foul. (Harris’ team also includes pros from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 bid, in which age was a double-edged sword, as Trump was 70 and she was 69, and she faced more hushed whispers about her abilities.)
Obama, of course, came out on top. In that election, 53% of that electorate was over the age of 45. The 45-to-59 cohort split evenly, according to exit polls. The only age-based group that favored McCain was the 60-and-up crowd, which he won 51% to 47%. (Obama saw negligible improvement over Kerry, the 2004 nominee, in both groups.)
The balancing act is a tough one, and one that Harris’ team and her supporters need to be exceedingly careful about. In the latest CBS News poll, voters ages 45-64 are siding with Trump, 53% to 46%. Among voters ages 65 and up, that grows to 57% to 42%.
Maybe voters have grown numb to Trump’s stream of norm-breaking, head-scratching conduct. Maybe their assessment of him is cemented in place, no matter his behavior in the final weeks of the campaign. Maybe Trump actually is the candidate most Americans want to see lead the country and his decision to play tunes for a night instead of delivering the same rambling speech matches where voters are. And just maybe, a lot of voters are having their own introductions to ageism and see latent signs of it everywhere they look—including maybe in a hard-fought presidential campaign.
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