Joe Biden has aged well ...

Steven Waldman sums up one of Joe Biden's secret weapons: 

NON-SENILE SENIORS SYMPATHIZE. If Biden wins, it will be in part because he did better among seniors than Hillary did. Now being old doesn’t mean you’ll win over older voters. It doesn’t work that way. But something special happened this year. Trump made Biden’s cognitive decline a key issue in the campaign, implying that he’s senile.

Here’s the reality that neither side has been willing to say: yes, of course, Biden has declined cognitively. He’s seventy-frickin’-seven! But that’s not the same as being senile.  Biden has shown that as we age, what we will lose cognitively may be more than made up for by the improvement of other traits — patience, wisdom, forgiveness, steadfastness. Biden is a poster child for old men. Of course, the bigger reason Biden is winning over seniors probably is COVID, but I do wonder whether there are elderly voters out there who resent Trump’s conflation of being old with being useless. 

... to be sure, being old would not have worked the same way with other candidates. Seventy-one-year old Elizabeth Warren, for instance, would always have been perceived as too woke rather than insufficiently awake. And if Biden loses, we’ll find plenty of age-related reasons. But for now, it seems that Biden has aged well. And — to use a phrase that was once seemed terrifying and now seems adorable – that’s no malarkey.

My tribe is stepping up? 

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I spent Saturday morning phoning "low propensity" voters in Florida in support of Joe Biden. That means people who sometimes vote -- and sometimes don't get around to it. In Florida, a lot of them are elders. We had talked with most of them previously, so these were friendly calls. The oldest person I called was 103; many were in their seventies or older.

Our pitch was simple: what do you think four more years of Trump would be like? For many, that opened the floodgates to a rush of horror. These people want to see the last of that man!

We were able to tell these voters where the polls are; for a few, we could offer rides. Florida is thought to be close. Just maybe, these old folks will push Biden over the finish line ... They certainly hope so.

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This post, like so much of my understanding of getting old, was inspired by my friend Ronni Bennett whose life ended on Friday. Before she went, she voted -- dutifully and a little grimly -- for the hope of a better country than the one she knew she was soon departing.