They were just two short sentences, spoken 72 minutes into a 73-minute speech. But those lines may turn out to be, particularly in 2024, the most significant things President Joe Biden said during his second State of the Union address: “I’m not new to this place. I stand here tonight having served as long as about any one of you have ever served here.” 

Those words got the attention of Mike Donilon, sitting in the Capitol audience. Donilon, the administration’s top strategist, has been working closely with Biden for more than 40 years. He knows the way Biden thinks better than just about anyone other than the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden; he had written parts of Biden’s State of the Union speech but not those lines. “He made it up right there,” Donilon tells me later. One key to Biden’s success as president has been playing against the stereotype that he’s a gaffe-prone logorrheic. So the president going off-script was notable—especially on this subject, even when raised cleverly and obliquely. “He’s not,” Donilon says, with careful understatement, “the most inclined to kind of go to talking about his age.”

When Joe Biden was a child, there were only 48 states. He joined the Senate in 1973; 7 of his 99 colleagues from that year are still alive. At 80, he is older than roughly 96 percent of his fellow Americans. He has kept going through major political defeats, life-threatening health crises, and searing personal tragedies. Biden’s durability has become a defining trait, inseparable from what one ally calls his “magic power”—his ability to exceed expectations. Just three years ago he was written off, after dismal showings in 2020’s early primaries, as a viable contender for the Democratic nomination. Then, after Biden defeated incumbent president Donald Trump, conventional wisdom predicted a polarized Congress would laugh off his talk of bipartisan legislation. Just one year ago Biden’s first term was being described as dead in the water, and longtime allies like David Axelrod were voicing doubts about a second term.

Instead, Biden’s presidency has now seen the passage of bills worth trillions of dollars to do everything from stemming the pandemic to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. Biden has led an international effort to stave off Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And he has ostensibly cleared the Democratic primary field. “He has been underestimated his entire political career—and I think he would say his entire life, going back to his childhood,” says Kate Bedingfield, a longtime senior adviser who recently left the White House. “But he has an incredibly determined and steady mentality that is about putting one foot in front of the other.”

There will be plenty of surprises between now and November 2024. Yet as Biden runs for a second term, one issue is sure to present a steep hurdle. “You hear it in focus groups, you hear it in qualitative research all the time,” Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher says. “It is a question of whether or not, because of his age, he’s up to the job.” Even Biden’s staunchest allies know the subject looms large. “Joe Biden I’m sure has lost a step,” says James Clyburn, the 82-year-old Democratic congressman who resuscitated Biden’s 2020 campaign with an endorsement in the South Carolina primary. “It’s a legitimate concern. I don’t hit my 5-iron as far as I used to—but I can still play 36 holes of golf a day. You learn how to make certain adjustments. I think Joe Biden knows how to operate within himself. And I would much rather have an 82-year-old Joe Biden as president than a 42-year-old Donald Trump.”

Biden made his reelection bid official in late April. If the timing of the announcement—four years to the day he announced his run in 2019—didn’t make it clear that Biden wants 2024 to be a rerun, the content did, leaning on images of January 6 and Donald Trump. Biden’s campaign will talk a great deal about his first term, but his team knows it needs to again stoke fear of MAGA. 

This time though, Biden’s advanced age suffuses everything about his presidency, from the invaluable experience he brings to the job to the anxiety that he might not live to finish a second term. The best practical political argument for another Biden run, in addition to his first-term record, is that the Democrats don’t have any other obviously stronger candidate. But there’s a personal element at work too. The president is a father who has suffered the early deaths of two of his children, including his eldest son and presumed political heir, Beau. Those losses fuel Biden’s empathy, and they are part of what compels him to keep going as long and as far as his health allows. In 2024, in his 13th and final campaign, Biden will again try to defy expectations. Yet he won’t simply be running against the Republican nominee. He’ll be running to make up for lost time.

The mood in the White House was grim. After months of tense negotiations with pivotal Democratic senator Joe Manchin over a $1.75 trillion social spending package, a deal had seemed within reach. Then, suddenly, it was falling apart. “Senator Manchin gave an interview where it appeared he was saying he was walking away from it, an interview in West Virginia. And the feeling in the building was, ‘Well, this is over,’ ” says Anita Dunn, whom Biden installed to revive his foundering 2020 primary campaign and who is now a senior White House adviser. “The president was overseas. We talked to him and he said, ‘No, no, no, don’t put out a statement. Don’t assume that this is where it ends. We’ve got to give him some more space.’ And it came back together. He has a very good sense of how you give people the space they need to get to the result you want.”

There is little Biden has not seen during 53 years of political life. That experience, deep and broad, was crucial to his two greatest triumphs so far as president. The tortuous dance with Manchin to agree on what ultimately became known as the Inflation Reduction Act turned, in part, on Biden’s ability to learn from his past. He always looks for the good in people; when President Barack Obama sent Biden to Capitol Hill to negotiate, a congressional insider recalls, the then VP’s penchant for taking Mitch McConnell at his word led to trouble. Last year, after Biden’s very public failure to persuade Manchin, he backed off and let New York senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, handle the direct behind-the-scenes conversations that yielded an unexpected bargain in July 2022. “We were a team. We talked several times each week,” Schumer says of his role with the president on the bill. “He let me work the Senate. He knew I had a very good relationship with Manchin. There was a period where Manchin wouldn’t talk to anyone but me. He and Manchin had their ups and downs, but now they’re getting along very well.”

Biden’s experience played an equally large part in his other signature achievement, repairing the damage done to international alliances during Trump’s term. Biden could not predict where or when the renewed bonds might pay off. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the foundation of what became an indispensable coalition was already in place. “Joe Biden has sayings that he repeats over and over,” says Tom Carper, a Democratic senator from Delaware who has been his close friend for decades. “One of my favorites is, ‘All politics is personal.’ He believes that to his core. That’s why he’s spent so much time with Putin and Xi, with people like Jim Eastland, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond. People say, ‘How could Joe Biden possibly work with these people?’ It’s because he believes all politics is personal, all diplomacy is personal. Same thing with Joe Manchin. Always treat him with respect. Try to understand his point of view. Try to get to yes.”

The inside game has produced Biden’s biggest victories. What it hasn’t done is earned him much love with the public. The president’s job-approval numbers, after rallying into the modest mid-40s, were back down to 37 percent in a late April Gallup poll. The prevalent theory about the disconnect between Biden’s policy wins—which are generally popular—and his personal ratings is that the American public is in a bitter mood about politics. Biden’s camp believes that the mainstream media is also a large, dampening contributor, caring more about the president’s performative skills than his mastery of the levers of government. “One of the benefits of him in this office is the kind of wisdom, experience, and perspective that he brings to bear on these problems,” Donilon says. “It matters. But it tends to be dismissed.”

Partly that’s because of Biden’s age; partly it’s because of his familiarity to Washington and media elites. The administration’s media strategy may also contribute. It has been true to the president’s retro blue-collar character. Biden events tend to be conventional podium speeches or ribbon cuttings; he isn’t all over social media trying to be hip—even the “Dark Brandon” meme was something repurposed. He grants few sit-down interviews. And “Twitter isn’t real life” continues to be an article of faith in Biden-world. But understatement may also feed the president’s underwhelming poll numbers. 

There’s another factor, though, perhaps the most important and least discussed: that coming after Trump, Biden is the presidential equivalent of an aspirin, necessary and useful but unglamorous and unloved. “Biden has a better economic and legislative and world-stage record than Obama did at the same point in their presidencies, but Obama got more credit,” says a Democratic consultant who has worked with the White House. “There’s something else there. Voters were never clamoring for Biden. Is it because people see him as a stopgap president, someone they needed to get rid of Trump?”

Ed Rollins was the campaign director for President Ronald Reagan’s successful reelection bid in 1984, when Reagan was 73. “We knew going into the race that it was the only issue,” Rollins says. “At the time he was the oldest president, he’d been shot, he’d had some health issues.” So the campaign arranged to have Reagan appear on the cover of Parade magazine in an undershirt, lifting weights, under the headline “How to Stay Fit,” and, below that, “By Ronald Reagan.” More famously, during his second debate with Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, Reagan slyly said, “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” 

Rollins is now the chief strategist at Ready for Ron, a group trying to help Republican Ron DeSantis win the presidency in 2024, so he’s not particularly interested in providing advice to Biden on how to neutralize the age issue. But he says if DeSantis, the Florida governor, becomes Biden’s opponent, he should avoid raising it overtly. “You basically go out and be very vigorous,” Rollins says. “He’s got a young, handsome family, and he can use lots of examples about what a family of his generation is facing today.”

Other Republicans, without evidence, have been slagging Biden’s mental health for years now and show no signs of letting up. “Joe Biden is unwell. He’s unfit for office. He’s incoherent, incapacitated, and confused. He doesn’t know where he is half the time,” Florida senator Rick Scott claimed last spring. In February, Republican presidential candidate and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley gracelessly called for mandatory “mental competency tests” for politicians older than 75, straining to contrast her relative youth with the senior status of Trump and Biden.

There will be plenty of other, somewhat more subtle attempts to question Biden’s capabilities, and the press will be on high alert for stumbles. “I hate saying this, but the president doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt [with voters] simply because they see him as an old, feeble man,” the Democratic consultant who has worked with the White House says. “Everything is seen through the prism of his age. So Republicans will keep driving the idea that he’s weak: He didn’t shoot down that goddamned [Chinese] balloon because he’s weak. It’s a real hurdle that the campaign will have to overcome and solve for.”

Sarah Longwell is a Republican strategist who specializes in studying swing voters in pivotal states like Pennsylvania and Arizona. “We don’t bring up his age in focus groups,” she says. “The people in the group bring it up. They think his experience is a positive. But they’ll say, ‘I know people in their 80s. They shouldn’t be in charge of the largest military superpower on the planet.’ Plus the right is so good at pumping out clips of Biden’s verbal missteps, the concern about his age is omnipresent.”

In some respects Biden's team welcomes Republican attacks: It helps them frame his opponents as unserious and it makes plenty of voters uncomfortable, because regardless of partisan allegiance, most see Biden as a decent, caring person. "One thing we found in our focus groups in 2020 was that any attacks on Biden backfired," says Lis Smith, the strategist behind Pete Buttigieg's surprisingly strong run for the Democratic nomination. "Nobody wanted to see a candidate punch Uncle Joe in the face." Biden's camp is otherwise somewhat divided: Should their candidate voluntarily raise the age issue or ignore it and let his job performance speak for itself? The president has lately been experimenting with humor, leading his speech at April's White House Correspondents Association dinner with jokes about his age. 

In 2020, because of COVID, a sizable majority of Biden’s campaign appearances were by Zoom, from a basement studio set up in his Wilmington, Delaware, house, a circumstance that allowed the campaign to protect the candidate’s health and to minimize opportunities for Biden to look physically vulnerable. He won’t have that luxury in 2024, even if he follows a Rose Garden strategy and spends the bulk of his time in Washington, claiming that he’s tending to presidential business. His inner circle—including longtime aides like Donilon, former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, and White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, along with relative newcomers such as Bedingfield, White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and White House senior adviser Dunn—have discussed how a 2024 campaign can demonstrate Biden’s vitality without running the octogenarian candidate into the ground. “The campaign planning is very much an Anita Dunn show, and Jen O’Malley,” a Biden insider says.

“He’ll be campaigning. That is what candidates do,” Dunn says crisply. “But it won’t be every day, because as president, he also has a day job. He’ll strike the balance that every incumbent president running for reelection strikes, appropriately.”

In February, Biden’s doctor, after giving the president a three-hour exam, issued a clean bill of health. His friends and associates testify to Biden’s high energy level, his sound memory, his physical fitness. They insist no accommodations have been made to Biden’s daily routine to account for his advanced years. Cedric Richmond, a former Democratic congressman from Louisiana who served as a White House senior adviser during Biden’s first two years in office, says he made sure to avoid saying anything about going to the gym, lest he be invited to join Biden’s early-morning workouts. “I’ve seen his work ethic up close. It’s not something I would want,” Richmond, now a senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee, says. “At the end of the day, when he walks upstairs to the residence, people deliver briefing books for him to read by the next morning. That’s another two hours of work.” They point to the fact that Jill Biden is her husband’s fiercest protector—in 2004, when advisers were trying to convince Joe Biden to run against President George W. Bush, Jill Biden, sitting beside the family pool, scrawled “NO” on her stomach with a Sharpie and marched through the living room in her bikini—and that she would be the first person to object to a 2024 campaign if she thought Joe was at risk. Instead, Jill has repeatedly and publicly endorsed his pursuing a second term.

“I like to think I am careful about what I eat and what I do, but I’m not even in the same ballpark,” Ted Kaufman, who is 84, says. Kaufman was Biden’s top aide for years, and in 2008 was his handpicked replacement as Delaware senator. He has been at Biden’s side through too many dark days: the two aneurysms that threatened the then senator’s life in 1988; his son Beau’s death from brain cancer at the age of 46 in 2015, a blow that helped persuade Biden not to run for president the next year. “And I knew him back in 1972,” Kaufman says quietly—a shorthand, halting reference to the car crash that killed Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi. “It was hard. It was really hard. But I never heard him say, ‘Why me?’ ” 

Perhaps that’s because the intimate, awful knowledge of mortality has bred in Biden not self-pity but a keen appreciation for the fleeting nature of time. And a feeling that he owes it to the people he’s lost to keep pressing forward. “There’s no question that his life in public service has made him a true public servant in the sense of duty, in the sense of what you owe other people, and in the sense of leading a country he loves,” Dunn says. The expectations that have always mattered most to Biden are those of his family. Beau is often on his mind, with the president wondering if he’s measuring up in his late son’s eyes. Biden often calls himself “a great respecter of fate.” He understands, viscerally, that no one ever really knows what’s ahead. 

In his prime Ed Rendell was tall, rugged, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested, a garrulous physical presence. Now the former Pennsylvania governor can’t walk unaided. And Rendell considers himself very lucky—balance is the only thing that Parkinson’s disease has robbed from him, so far. 

Rendell, 79, has been a friend of Biden’s for decades and thinks he’s been a brilliant president. “If I told you that Joe Biden will continue on with his same physical and mental qualities, same cognitive ability, et cetera, he’d be fine, it wouldn’t be an issue,” Rendell says. “But he’d turn 86 in the fourth year of a second term. Every time I see him walk up the stairs to Air Force One, I shudder. He has slipped a few times. It would take me about 25 minutes to get up those stairs.”

Ricchetti, Biden’s White House counselor, answers such worry by citing recent history. “Look at the trip to Ukraine [in February]. Just from a physical standpoint, the effort to fly overnight, spend 14 hours on a train back and forth,” he says. “For the president, the answer on all this is just look at his performance, look at what he’s done. He is displaying all of the attributes of both judgment and physical stamina in office that you would want in a president of any age.”

For some Democrats support for Biden mixes with misgivings about who is next in line to succeed him as president. “I think that’s something that we gotta all just be realistic about,” says John Morgan, a Florida lawyer and major Democratic donor who has been critical of Vice President Kamala Harris. “Kamala does not poll well, is alienating to a lot of people, and will be a primary target in a reelect. Nobody says it because everybody’s worried about I won’t get invited back to the Christmas party at the White House. But you’ve got to address it, because we all know it.”

For others Biden’s age is less an actuarial than a generational problem, a question of whether he’s out of touch with voters five or six decades his junior. In 2020, as a candidate, he talked of being “a bridge” to the next wave of leaders. Now Biden wants to lengthen that bridge by four more years, and younger voters, who were a key component of his victory over Trump, may be reluctant to turn out again for a man older than many of their grandparents. The president’s recent attempts to inoculate himself against cultural wedge issues—by siding with Congressional Republicans to block a District of Columbia criminal justice reform bill and by floating a “compromise” federal rule change that would allow schools to ban transgender student athletes from some sports—are unlikely to help. Varshini Prakash, the 30-year-old executive director of the Sunrise Movement, praises Biden’s climate change initiatives, but she’s strikingly noncommittal when it comes to supporting him for a second term. “I don’t think age matters as much as people think. We are simply looking for a candidate who is going to reflect the values and vision that young people have and who is going to take the necessary action to protect our future,” Prakash says. “How difficult it is to turn out youth voters will depend on two things: how visionary and ambitious Biden’s plans continue to be, and how well he’s able to distinguish himself from some of the front-runners on the Republican side, like DeSantis and Trump.”

Ah, yes, contrast. Dunn relishes the matchup, regardless of who the Republican nominee is. “When the president ran last time, I think we got asked that question, whether he was too old, about as much as any other question,” she says. “And at the end of the day, voters made their decisions based on other things.”

It would be entirely reasonable for Biden to decide he wants to go out on a high note and to announce that he’s changed his mind and that instead of jousting with Marjorie Taylor Greene until 2028 he will be spending his remaining years hanging out with his seven grandchildren. Russ Feingold doesn’t see that happening.

Feingold, at the age of 39, became the Senate’s most junior member in 1993, representing Wisconsin, and he became friendly with Biden while serving three terms. Feingold remembers visiting Biden in the vice presidential residence, a grand 19th-century Queen Anne–style home perched on a hill in northwest Washington, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Feingold had been invited to chat about judicial nominations. “We sat down and he pointed over to the swimming pool. He says, ‘You know, I get to be with my grandkids out here every weekend. It is so great,’ ” Feingold says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m so cool, I’m vice president.’ It was like this family guy. What I saw on Capitol Hill was many, many political people who forgot about their families. Biden never did. Biden went home every night. I was jealous of that. So he may feel like that family is so tight with him that he doesn’t really give that up by continuing.”

Occupying public office is what the Bidens have known since 1970, when Joe was elected to the New Castle County Council. The lone, unhappy exception was the four years of Trump’s presidency, when Biden was tending to the traumatic aftermath of Beau’s death. He has spent his entire adult life in politics and has gone to great lengths—taking the train home to Delaware most nights to help raise Beau and Hunter during his years as a senator—to maintain a deep connection with his family. Along the way, politics, the public, and family became indivisible. 

That isn’t what Biden talks about, of course, as he sketches reelection themes and a second-term agenda. He talks about broadening economic opportunity. “He is fundamentally trying to reshape the economy from, basically, what Reagan put in place a long time ago,” Donilon says. That’s why Biden’s most recent budget proposal—featuring billions in tax increases for the rich and spending on childcare—was important. It has no hope of congressional approval. But it was an opening statement for his reelection campaign.

Biden will also stress the very much unfinished business of shoring up democracy. Defeating Trump again might drive a stake into the heart of the insurrection. “He gave three speeches on democracy last year,” Donilon says. “He took a lot of criticism for giving the last one. People said it wasn’t relevant to the midterm election. He basically said to me, ‘Look, Mike, I don’t care if this matters a bit in the midterm. I’m going to talk about democracy because I’m seeing, I’m reading, I’m hearing increased focus on civil war and violence. And I’m going to speak to it.’ And he was right—voters did care. In each of those moments as I looked at him delivering those speeches, I thought, You know what? This is a serious American leader. These moments are going to stand up over time.”

There’s that word again. After running for president repeatedly over the course of 32 years and falling short, Biden finally won because he was the antidote to Trump the country wanted, the experienced hand it needed to calm the chaos. Now, after a first term full of accomplishments, the question will become whether Biden can stretch his time as president beyond that fraught moment and into something truly historic. Something ageless.