Former vice president Joe Biden said his verbal mixups on the campaign trail are a result of "being tired," not his childhood stutter.
"I'll find myself searching for a second" to find the right words, Biden told Axios, but, he added, "I've always attributed that to being tired and not to the stutter."
"I don't think of myself as continuing to stutter," Biden said. "Look, the mistakes I make are mistakes. And some people think I still stutter. I don't think of myself that way."
Biden also dismissed media concerns about his errors, which have included thinking the Parkland massacre happened when he was in office and not recalling the decade of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
"[Voters] don't think I lost a step," he said. "There's no evidence to suggest that. You guys love it. You guys love it. But I haven't seen any evidence of that."
Biden, who turned 77 last month, has consistently flubbed his wording on the debate stage and during speeches. He has written about enduring a stutter as a boy but does not see himself a stutterer now, in spite of an Atlantic article identifying the stutter as the cause of his campaign-trail speaking problems.
If he were to win the White House next year, Biden would be the oldest first-term president in American history. Donald Trump is the current record-holder, first winning the office at age 70.