How much do Democratic voters actually care about Biden’s age?

Since Biden being 3 years younger than Trump is rapidly becoming the EMAILS! of 2024, you keep seeing polls showing that a majority of Democratic voters don’t want him to run again. Which help produce more “BIDEN IS OLD” stories and the cycle continues.

There are, however, some obvious reasons to be skeptical about how meaningful these polls are. The first is the obvious disconnect between theory and practice. Biden won the Democratic nomination going away in 2020, and his top rival was two years older than he was. Indeed, in a very crowded field with several well-regarded younger politicians candidates over the age of 70 got 92.6% of the vote in the 2020 primaries. This is…not easy to square with the claim that age is a hugely important consideration for Democratic primary voters,

There’s an additional issue with “Democrats prefer someone else” polls, which is that Democrats can’t actually run “Generic Democrat Who Is Younger Than Joe Biden.” Barring a radical change to the Democratic primary electorate, we can be pretty confident that they don’t prefer Kamala Harris, who would be by far the most likely nominee if Biden didn’t run. These polls might indicate that given a few seconds of thought the typical Democratic voter would prefer that Joe Biden be replaced by Johnny or Jane Unbeatable Who Agrees With Me About Everything, but the significance of this is highly limited.

Anyway, Biden is running again, he’s not going to be seriously challenged, this is fine, and nobody actually thinks that Biden being a couple years younger than the Republican nominee should influence anybody’s vote.