“As I’ve done ever since being elected to office, I ask you all, without regard to party, to join together and defend our democracy,” Biden told the assembled lawmakers, plainly laying out the stakes of November’s contest.

The speech was well received by Democrats, who have spent months fretting whether Biden has the vigor for the campaign ahead.

“Nobody is going to talk about cognitive impairment now,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) told the president shortly after he was done.

And Biden allies were quick to use the performance to combat age criticisms.

“So here’s my question — are we going to have another forty news cycles about Biden’s age now that he just delivered a barnstormer on the House floor?” said Pat Dennis, the president of American Bridge 21st Century, a top Democratic super PAC. “His opponent couldn’t tout record job numbers, protecting reproductive rights, or unifying our nation at his State of the Union addresses — because he didn’t do any of those things. The comparison between Donald Trump and President Biden couldn’t be more stark.”

And, to a degree, that was a victory for the White House.

But the speech was hardly defensive. Coming eight months before voters go to the polls, the address saw Biden defend the nation’s democracy against extremist forces and repeatedly attack Trump, the criminally indicted presidential front-runner.

Biden delivered a vigorous and rapid speech for 67 minutes at high volume. He had some stumbles but also delighted his staff with the way he jostled with Republicans. He painted himself as an experienced, steady hand, even if he was getting long in the tooth.

“Now some other people my age see a different story,” said Biden, who referred to his “predecessor” 13 times. “An American story of resentment, revenge, and retribution. That’s not me.”

The State of the Union address has proven to be a beneficial moment for Biden during his presidency. Last year, he won an impromptu exchange with Republican hecklers about the future of Social Security and Medicare. But while internal White House polling from a year ago revealed the speech eased some voters’ doubts about Biden’s age, West Wing aides have repeatedly acknowledged the stakes are much higher now with Election Day approaching.

That is, in part, because of the sheer number of complicated issues Biden faces. On Thursday, he confronted a variety of those. Biden touted an improving American economy and addressed the migrant influx at the southern U.S. border by highlighting how Republicans rejected the recent bipartisan border security deal at Trump’s behest.

He also held up a button handed to him earlier by heckler Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and addressed the parents of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old student killed last month by an immigrant who authorities say entered the U.S. illegally. Though he flubbed the victim’s first name and used the cringeworthy term “an illegal,” he used the moment to call for the GOP to approve the bill it once supported.

“Unfortunately congressional politics has derailed this bill so far,” Biden said. “Look at the facts: I know you know how to read.”

Perhaps the thorniest topic, however, was the Israel-Hamas war, which Biden had not given a major address on since the days following the Oct. 7 attacks that set the fighting in motion. The night gave Biden a chance to reframe the conflict, to more clearly articulate why the United States has backed Israel despite the images of humanitarian horror emerging from Gaza. His handling of the war has received low marks in polling and has alienated some of his base. The president on Thursday tried once more to thread the needle, acknowledging Israel’s right to defend itself, while also ordering the construction of a floating pier off Gaza to help facilitate aid deliveries to the suffering Palestinians.

The speech took head-on the dividing lines that have come to define this presidency, in which pleas for partisan differences to be set aside often clash against the realities of modern politics. A symbol of the bitter politics appeared just over Biden’s left shoulder: House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose brief time in power has been marked by internal GOP dysfunction but also an effort to impeach the president with little evidence. Johnson repeatedly grimaced and shook his head at a number of lines that Democrats cheered.

Biden seemed unfazed by how Republicans received his remarks. Instead, he appeared aiming to not just ease Democratic fears but to outfit them with a campaign template: the new mantle of the party of freedom. That included over reproductive rights.

That hot-button issue — brought to the forefront again recently by an Alabama judge’s ruling that endangered in vitro fertilization in that state — has proven to be an electoral winner for Democrats and will likely again dominate the upcoming campaign. But he never uttered the word “abortion” — he rarely does — though it was in the prepared text of the speech released by the White House.

For the 81-year-old president, old habits may be hard to break. But the night was spent trying to turn that age into a sign of wisdom. He noted, at one point, that he’d been born during World War II. And he began his speech by recalling how Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 urged an isolationist Congress to assist a world imperiled by war. He compared that moment to the nation’s current threats at home and abroad - notably pushing the Republicans to fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion — and repeatedly previewed what he believed was in the balance amid his looming rematch with Trump.

“Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” Biden said. “And my purpose tonight is to both wake up this Congress, and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either.”

Myah Ward contributed to this report.