Amid age concerns, the White House is trying a new strategy: Let Joe Be Joe

He wears aviator and baseball caps. He visits ice cream parlors and barbecue places and asks to meet with influencers who can spread images of him on TikTok and Instagram. He talks to reporters more often and answers questions about the Middle East, Republicans and of course his age.

None of this is a coincidence. As President Biden faces what polls show is great concern about his 81 years, and a close election against his likely opponent, Donald J. Trump, the White House strategy is to get him out of his protective bubble and address voters’ concerns directly. .

The issue gained momentum last month when Mr. Biden angrily defended himself against a special counsel report that described him as a “well-meaning, older man with a bad memory.” The president quickly became a favorite punchline of late-night talk show hosts, infuriating his allies, who acknowledge that while Biden can’t turn back the clock, he can at least try to reset the way voters see him to set.

“I’ve been saying to the campaign for several months, ‘Please let him be Joe Biden,’ and so have many others,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close ally of the president, said in an interview. “It’s not just good for the campaign. It’s good for him and it’s good for the country if Joe Biden has the opportunity to come out from behind the stage and be less President Joe Biden and more Joe.”

To that end, Mr. Biden is expected to frame the age issue in his favor by highlighting his legislative achievements in his State of the Union address Thursday evening. The point he is making, aides say, is that his achievements as president may have eluded less experienced politicians.

Part of the White House strategy, which has evolved since the start of the year, is to focus Biden’s travels outside Washington more on social media and one-on-one experiences with voters. The White House this year began inviting locals and content creators to meet Mr. Biden during campaign stops, where the president often takes a moment to introduce himself.

Some of Mr. Biden’s top advisers, including Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager, and Anita Dunn, who oversees Mr. Biden’s communications strategy, believe that social media influencers and locals who visit the president during his visits meet, have the ability to introduce Mr. Biden. for a younger, more diverse audience that would otherwise not know him. (When Mr. Biden visited a family in North Carolina in January, a TikTok The visit by one of his presenters was viewed four million times, according to statistics shared by the Biden campaign.)

In an interview, Mr. Flaherty said that Mr. Biden often sends a barrage of requests to aides working on digital media for the campaign. When Mr. Trump last week compared himself to Aleksei A. Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader, the president asked his aides to give him an iPad and had them post a video on TikTok of him responding to Mr. Trump’s comment.

“That came from his brain,” Mr. Flaherty said.

The president sometimes rewrites tweets to his liking and adds his own video responses, Mr. Flaherty said. “He has more demands than I am sometimes willing to fulfill.”

The official White House position is that getting the president out of his bubble has less to do with voters’ concerns about his age and more to do with getting the president in front of the president in an election year. “We have always known that the most effective way to reach the American people is when they can hear President Biden make his case directly and authentically,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement on Tuesday.

Biden’s closest allies say whatever the official pronouncements, it is crucial that the president shows he is up for the task of campaigning and for a second term, starting with his speech on Thursday.

“He needs to allay the fear that he is somehow on his last leg,” said Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a South Carolina Democrat and longtime Biden supporter. The president and his advisers, he said, “have been tackling it more head-on, and he should tackle it head-on in the State of the Union.”

In a poll from The New York Times and Siena College late last month, 56 percent of Democrats nationally said they thought Biden was too old to be an effective president.

“Is it a problem? Of course it is. No one is perfect in terms of their biography,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California. Mr Khanna added that presenting a forward-looking agenda to the country is as important as addressing concerns over the president’s age. “Campaigns should be about the future. They have to be exciting. They must have courage, they must have new ideas. And I think if he did that, that’s the way to put the age issue aside.”

Biden campaign officials say that once the election becomes a choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who is just four years younger, age will decline as a concern among Democratic and independent voters. The race will not be about Mr. Biden’s mental fitness, they argue, but about questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s.

In recent weeks, the campaign and key Democratic supporters have highlighted Trump’s missteps as part of an effort to neutralize age as an issue in a likely rematch between the two oldest presidential candidates in history.

“Listen to Donald Trump, who is ranting, makes no sense and can’t even remember who he’s running against,” Hillary Clinton said in an interview with SiriusXM on Monday. “If you’re worried about someone who doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on, I’d be a lot more worried about Donald Trump.”

In practice, letting Joe be Joe can be more difficult than it seems.

At events and speeches, Biden’s aides have become accustomed to showing no response to his mistakes, whether he is confusing foreign leaders at a campaign event or conflating Ukraine and Gaza during remarks in the Oval Office. They watch closely as Mr. Biden interacts with people who are traveling, and they nod as he takes a photo opportunity — still stationed far from reporters — at a bar or at a fire station.

They also dismissed criticism that Biden appeared too nonchalant in some situations, such as when he answered a question about Gaza while eating an ice cream cone. The point, his allies say, is that Mr. Biden was available for questions.

Much of the let-Joe-be-Joe encouragement comes from the president himself, according to his aides and people who know him.

“I don’t think anyone should ever think that Joe Biden won’t ultimately do what Joe Biden wants to do,” said John Morgan, a Democratic donor. Members of Mr. Biden’s family, including his son Hunter; his wife, Jill; and his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, are also advocating letting Mr. Biden be himself, despite their shared concerns about the wear and tear of the presidency on him.

Mr. Morgan said he had noticed an increase in Mr. Biden’s activity and appearance lately, including the president’s comments about his annual physical last week, joking that the doctors who examined him “find that I look too young’. Mr Morgan said taking the issue head-on was the best way for Mr Biden to tackle it at such a high stakes.

“I think it’s always wise to address the elephant in the room,” Mr. Morgan said. “I think you do it humorously, and then I think you do it seriously.”