The Harris campaign wants to make a more nuanced version of the argument.

By Megan Messerly and Myah Ward

08/16/2024 06:12 PM EDT

Donald Trump spent months framing his opponent as a doddering old man who couldn’t be trusted with the country’s future. Now he’s facing a similar attack from Kamala Harris.

The strategy is a byproduct of a Democratic Party newly unleashed by having a much younger candidate at the top of the ticket. And it’s part of a broader case the Harris campaign is making to the American people that the former president is a relic of a past that the country can’t afford to return to.

“Part of Trump is definitely about moving the country back and taking the country back, not moving it forward — taking it back to a time that people don’t want to return to. Age is a part of that,” said Anita Dunn, a longtime adviser to President Joe Biden. “But I don’t think age as a message against Trump is anywhere near as effective as what the vice president is doing right now, which is contrasting a positive vision of where this country can be versus Trump’s vision.”

That more nuanced argument is also the result of the fact that the age issue doesn’t work as well against Trump, 78, who voters have long viewed as more youthful than Biden, 81. A Marquette Law School Poll national survey released last week found that 57 percent of people think that Trump is too old, compared to 79 percent who worried about Biden’s age. Just 13 percent think the same about Harris, who is 59.

Some Democrats are relishing the fact that they can finally make an attack based on age after months of being forced to defend a historically old nominee. Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, 60, veered into overt attacks on Trump’s age at a fundraiser in Newport Beach, California, this week. He called Trump “low energy,” “tired” and the “guy that needs to get a little rest on the weekend.”

But leaning into Trump’s age specifically could alienate older voters and come off as hypocritical after Harris and other Democrats defended Biden’s age.

“I understand the future-versus-the-past argument. That’s a smart argument to make,” said Douglas Heye, a veteran GOP strategist. “People may view Donald Trump as erratic and unfocused, weird, whatever else. … But it is in voters’ minds that Donald Trump is a ball of energy. You can argue that that’s a benign ball or a malignant ball, but he’s a ball of energy.”

“Future versus past. Boom. That’s it,” he added. “But old?”

Harris herself is addressing the age issue more subtly, building upon a message she’s delivered on the trail over the last year. During her battleground state tour last week, the vice president warned of a past where corporations were given tax cuts that didn’t help the working class, people were denied medical coverage for preexisting conditions and women weren’t able to make decisions about their own reproductive health care. The crowd, unprompted, at several points chanted, “We’re not going back” — a phrase that has in less than weeks become a hallmark of the Harris campaign.

“This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump,” she said at a rally Saturday in Las Vegas. “It is about two different visions for our nation: one — ours — focused on the future; the other focused on the past.”

Trump’s age is the “cherry on top” of the vice president’s argument, said Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean.

“You already thematically want to go to the future, but now you’re able to also point to a very real thing, which is how much confidence do you have in this guy’s mental acuity, energy, overall health?” Maslin said. “Yeah, he can still play a decent game of golf. Okay, we’ll give him that. Is that enough?”

The fact that Trump is facing attacks on his age is partly of his own making. Before Harris upended the race, Trump’s campaign hammered Biden’s age, presenting the race as a choice between “strong and weak.” And after five years of a steady drumbeat of attacks against Biden’s mental acuity, the vice president has thrown the GOP’s message into disarray, said Celinda Lake, the president of Lake Research Partners and a lead pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign.

“I am honestly surprised that they can’t catch their stride. They have no idea how to run against her, at least to date,” she said.

And Trump keeps giving the Harris campaign fresh opportunities to dig into his age. He hosted a meandering, 90-minute press conference in New Jersey on Thursday that criticized Harris’ ban on “price gouging” on groceries, tying her to the Biden administration’s economic policies and calling her a “radical California liberal” — and then wandered onto other topics, including Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley and Cheerios. This was on top of other, similarly freewheeling public appearances in recent weeks, including a Monday interview with Elon Musk, another press conference in Mar-a-Lago last week and a speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month so long he broke his own record for speaking time at the convention.

“He goes on too long at his rallies and in these exchanges, and at his presser the other day, to where you get kind of bored, you lose the thread, you lose interest, which is not something you’re used to with Trump,” conservative pundit Megyn Kelly said on her podcast Tuesday. “I think that’s probably an age-related change.”
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The Harris campaign, in a mock media advisory ahead of Trump’s Thursday press conference, projected that the former president would “ramble incoherently.” Afterward, another press release panned the speech as “quite boring” and said “Trump tried to read some paper for more than 40 minutes, while giving a stream of not-much-consciousness.”

It’s the kind of attack Democrats couldn’t make as easily when Biden, prone to his own verbal stumbles and memory lapses, was at the top of the ticket.

Though Harris tries to present herself as a fresh face and an agent of change, her age puts her in the middle of the pack of recent presidents — younger than Biden, Trump and Ronald Reagan were when they took office, but older than Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. She and Trump are, at least by some metrics, technically of the same generation. The pair bookend the Baby Boomer generation according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition, which spans the former president’s birth year of 1946 to the vice president’s birth year of 1964. (Though Harris is often referred to as a member of Generation X.) And the vice president is herself just six years from qualifying for Medicare.

Still, the two are a study in contrasts: a nearly 80-year-old, white, male property tycoon from New York and an almost 60-year-old Black and Indian American, female prosecutor from California’s Bay Area.

“There were a lot of Americans who didn’t want the same choice from four years ago. They wanted something different. They wanted something new. That’s what Harris-Walz gives them,” Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “It’s a generationally different ticket.”