The Associated Press poll has a lot of interesting data in it, but one thing stands out: Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all agree on one thing: Joe Biden is too old to be president.

That doesn’t mean his opponent, if it is Trump, is a shoe in. Too many people believe that Trump is too awful in other ways and may wind up voting for the corpse instead of the crook.

"In the poll, fully 77% said Biden is too old to be effective for four more years. Not only do 89% of Republicans say that, so do 69% of Democrats."

But voters also think Trump is corrupt and awful. And they'll take old and senile over that. https://t.co/zdKijvI4pf

— Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) August 28, 2023

Wouldn’t it be nice if we got a choice between two vigorous, well-regarded people whose policies are the big issues, and not their personal characteristics?

That ship sailed long ago, I am afraid, and not just because of Trump and Biden, but rather because the divide between liberals and conservatives is so wide that we wind up choosing candidates based solely upon tribal loyalties and not policy differences. There will be no Nixon/Kennedy or Ike/Stevenson elections in the near future.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans actually agree on something in this time of raw discord: Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president in a second term. Only a few years his junior, Donald Trump raises strikingly less concern about his age.

But they have plenty of other problems with Trump, who at least for now far outdistances his rivals for the Republican nomination despite his multiple criminal indictments. Never mind his advanced years — if anything, some say, the 77-year-old ought to grow up.

I have to admit that while I don’t think the AP should be editorializing like this in a news story, I like the framing. A lot of us who otherwise like Trump on the issues do think of him as childish. No adult would refer to an opponent as “Rob DeSanctimonious,” after all. It makes me cringe that I am constantly having to filter out name-calling and insults. On policy I like 70% of Trump; on personality, I find him nearly insufferable.

Biden? He was always a dunce. Now he is a senile dunce.

In the poll, fully 77% said Biden is too old to be effective for four more years. Not only do 89% of Republicans say that, so do 69% of Democrats. That view is held across age groups, not just by young people, though older Democrats specifically are more supportive of his 2024 bid.

While it is amusing that slightly more Democrats think Trump is too old to run for president than Biden (Trump is younger and clearly more vigorous than Sleepy Joe), that simply is an artifact of partisanship. Which tells you that probably more than 69% of Democrats actually believe Biden is too old, and they simply don’t want to admit it.

When 70% of your supporters think you don’t belong in office that is a bad sign.

The AP-NORC survey went beyond posing questions and presenting choices. It also had a word association exercise, asking people to offer the first word or phrase that comes to mind at the mention of each man.

The answers underscored how age is a particular drag for Biden across party lines, even when people aren’t prompted to think about that, and how Trump largely escapes that only to draw disdain if not disgust on other fronts.

In those visceral responses, 26% mentioned Biden’s age and an additional 15% used words such as “slow” or “confused.” One Republican thought of “potato.” Among Democrats, Biden’s age was mentioned upfront by 28%. They preferred such terms over “president,” “leader,” “strong” or “capable.” One who approves of his performance nevertheless called him “senile.”

Only 3% in the survey came up with “confused” as the first descriptor for Trump, and a mere 1% used “old” or the like. Instead, the top words were those like “corrupt” or “crooked” (15%), “bad” and other generally negative terms (11%), words such as “liar” and “dishonest” (8%), along with “good” and other generally positive comments (8%).

Unfortunately, while voters don’t think Biden is up to the job, too many of them also don’t think Trump should be anywhere near the Oval Office either, which is why the polls have them in essentially a dead heat. You can assume that a lot of people who think Biden should hit the retirement home or memory care facility will wind up voting for him anyway.

The 2024 election will likely boil down to the question: Who do you hate the most? Each candidate will have partisans who love them for who they are, and this is especially true for Trump. However the vast majority of the votes will be cast as a rejection of the other candidate or party.

It is often thus, and will be more so this time around. There will be very few votes cast this time around on the issues of the day.

Ironically, I believe either party could solidify its chances against the other by choosing a different candidate. If Biden were replaced by (yuck!) Whitmer or even Newsom (double-yuck) against Trump would almost certainly win, and if Trump were replaced with DeSantis or any of the other top candidates against Biden they would almost certainly win.

Neither Trump nor Biden is remotely a normal candidate, and people are longing for a more normal world, even if that normality would turn out to be an illusion. We are in this spot because the political world itself is abnormal, not the other way around. Trump is on top because Republicans (rightly) believe the system is rigged, and Biden is on top because Democrats have gone hard left.

Psychologically Americans are desperate for a return to normality; unfortunately the new normal is political warfare.

So it goes.