The question of Reagan’s age was rarely discussed until 1984, when the 73-year-old president, once nicknamed the “Great Communicator” for his skill at delivering speeches, performed extremely poorly at the first debate of the 1984 election cycle, paling in comparison with his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale.
In his 2010 memoir, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics, Mondale recalled his opponent’s behavior, detailing how Reagan “mangled” his trusty anecdotes, gripped onto the podium and “even started forgetting some of his lines.”
“It was actually a little frightening,” Mondale wrote.
A poll conducted after the October 7 debate showed that the incumbent’s lead over Mondale had dropped from 18 to 11 points. Forty-nine percent of voters thought Reagan was no longer as sharp as he once was.
The campaign wrote the debate off as a bad night. Paul Laxalt, a senator and general chairman of the Republican re-election campaign, blamed Reagan’s debate preparation, which he claimed “brutalized” and “smothered” the president with too many statistics. Reagan admitted that he had done “a lot of homework myself, probably too much of it, without sitting back and relaxing.”
In his controversial 2011 memoir, My Father at 100, Ron Reagan, one the president’s sons, pointed to the debate as an early sign that his father suffered from undiagnosed mental health problems while still in office.
“My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words,” Ron wrote. “He looked tired and bewildered.”
The public became increasingly aware of the president’s age in the aftermath of the debate. The Wall Street Journal, widely seen as sympathetic to Reagan, ran an article headlined “New Question in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age?”
Politically, Mondale was too tame of an opponent to push the issue, in part because he worried about the optics of berating an old man. As Mondale reflected in his memoir, “Reagan’s performance underscored the point I was trying to make: He was not engaged and in command of the issues. But it had never been my style of politics to jump on something like that.”
Even in the days immediately after the debate, a majority of voters saw Reagan as the more presidential—and electable—figure of the two.