A large majority of Americans want maximum age limits for elected officials, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released Thursday.
When asked if there should be a maximum age at which lawmakers should be forced to leave office, 73% of Americans agreed.
The large majority is bipartisan, with 71% of Democrats saying there should be a maximum age limit, along with 75% of independents and 75% of Republicans.
The majority support for a maximum age limit is also held through every age group of respondents.
An age limit was most prevalent among individuals between the ages of 30 and 64, with 75% in favor. 68% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 also believed there should be a maximum age limit.
The most popular cutoff age respondents selected was 70, with 40% indicating that should be the maximum age to hold public office. 18% chose a maximum age of 80, 26% of respondents wanted to ban people over 60 from serving in public office, and another 8% wanted a cutoff age of 50.
Currently, a third of United States Senators are over 70, CBS News notes, with the oldest members of Congress being 87-year-olds Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). President Biden is already the oldest president to take office in history at 79 years old and would be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025 if he were to win a second term.
The age of the president has been a point of contention among Democrats. In June, an anonymous Democratic strategist told The Hill that Biden’s age was “a problem.”
“He’s [expletive] old, and everyone knows it, but no one wants to talk about it for fear of offending him or anyone around him,” the strategist was quoted.
The following month, former Biden campaign surrogate Kevin Walling dismissed concerns about the president’s age, describing Biden as a “spry 79-year-old.”
“I was just with him two weeks ago on the South Lawn for the 4th of July celebration, he worked the rope line for three hours in the heat, and obviously, he just came back from the Middle East in that trip where he kept a really tight schedule,” said Walling. “I think the American people will be the judge of the president’s stamina in the next 800 days out from the 2024 election.”
President Biden’s age may hurt him with the American people at the ballot box. A New York Times/Siena College poll from early July found that just 26% of Democrats wanted Biden to be nominated for a second term in 2024.
Biden’s age was the most popular reason why he should not be the party’s nominee among Democratic respondents.
The CBS News poll released Tuesday also found that many think having more young people in elected office would improve politics.
Respondents were asked to choose from a list of groups they believed would make politics better if they occupied more elected offices.
No single group or answer garnered a majority overall. Still, the top response was having more young people in elected office at 47%, followed closely by having more women in office at 45%.
The CBS News poll surveyed 2,085 U.S. adults between August 29 and 31, 2022, with a margin of error of 2.6 points.