Ufot, channeling the rapper Ice Cube, said of Biden: “I need you to put your back into it!”

But both Ufot and Albright considered the hesitation about Biden’s age a bit of a red herring. For them, policy and voter engagement — and the time and resources put into both — will be more determinative.

On the policy front, Albright believes that the polling for Democrats, particularly in the fall of 2022, ticked up not only because the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but also because Biden finally took action on student loan forgiveness, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act with the most significant climate provisions in American history and the passage of relatively narrow, but still significant, federal gun legislation. A half year later, these Democratic wins can feel like old news, but they were agenda items that Democratic voters, including young voters, cared deeply about.

So if Biden made gains on some of the issues that young voters care about, why are the activists still concerned?

Biden’s challenge when it comes to younger voters isn’t so much his age, but his posture, they say. He was elected in part as an antidote to the chaos of the Donald Trump years. But, as Albright sees it now, “some of that stability that he offers, some of that comfort or whatever that he offers some folks, that has actually been, from our perspective, part of the problem.”

“When you’re in a moment like what we’re in,” Albright said, “you have to recognize that this is not a time for the normal, the traditional, the nostalgia or whatever, and that you need something different.”