How older Democratic voters are responding to Harris replacing Biden

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player… Easton, Pennsylvania CNN —

Darrell Ann Murphy is relieved, grateful and newly hopeful Democrats can win Pennsylvania and the White House. But she is also still upset, a little mad even.

“Wow, we’re losing Joe Biden,” said Murphy, 83, a retiree who keeps busy teaching the Chinese tile game Mahjong to fellow seniors. “Joe was us. He was every one of us. He cared so much about the middle class and everyone else of course.”

We revisited Murphy this week at her Easton home, and she assembled the same group for a Mahjong game as she did when we first stopped by five months ago. Then, three of the four women at the table said they believed Biden was up to the job and that criticism of his age was unfair. This time, all four said the 81-year-old president was doing the right thing by stepping away from the campaign.

“Surprise and relief” was how Catherine Long characterized her reaction. Long said she believes it was the president’s decision in the end, but added, “I didn’t like how people were telling him to get out of the game.”

Mary Ann Horvath also used the term relief and “much less anxiety.”

We included these voters in our All Over the Map battleground state project because they are all above the age of 70, members of the country’s most reliable voting demographic and residents of one of its bellwether presidential counties. The project’s goal is to track the 2024 campaign through the eyes and experiences of key voters — and what we heard, then and now, about their takes on the Biden age issue was telling.

The debate was the decisive moment.

“It was sad,” Horvath said.

But all of our Northampton County voters also told us they saw things in the