Sixteen paragraphs deep into Jim Newell’s (Slate) assessment of the acting president’s eroding support this year among seniors, we get to why. Yes, Donald Trump won voters 45 and older by 8 points in 2016 and voters 65 and older by 9 points. But an August 2020 Monmouth University poll shows Joe Biden leads registered voters over 65 by 17 points. Qunnipiac in July showed Biden’s lead with that cohort at 14 points. A 2014 Gallup poll showed seniors had shifted their support away from the Democratic Party. And now?
In Kissimmee, Florida, conservative Christian Army veteran and retired Bible translator Jim Farr is reevaluating his choices. He voted for Trump in 2016 even though he believed Trump behaved like a “3-year-old.” He may still vote for Republicans down the ballot in November, but likely will support Biden for president:
“I was hoping that if [Trump] started out at an emotional 3-year-old level, he would now be an adult,” Farr said, “but he seems to have regressed to a 2-year-old.” Even though he doesn’t agree with Biden on either economic or social policy, he comes across as “measured” and trustworthy.
“A bad plan with good people will work,” he said. “A good plan with bad people won’t.”
In Grand Junction, Colorado, Helen Lyon, 73, listened to friends and, despite misgivings, voted for Trump thinking the businessman would shake things up. Her husband the Democrat watches Stephen Colbert, whom she finds irritating. Eventually, however, she found herself asking her husband and herself:
“Did [Trump] really say that? Did he really tweet that? Did he really do that?” She would then look up what Trump said, tweeted, or did, and she began to wonder if she could vote for him again.
“And then, when COVID came,” she said, “and the way that he handled it and just said it was going to go away, I guess that was finally the minute that I was able to step out of that cognitive dissonance and say, ‘I cannot—I cannot—vote for this man.’ ”
Social Security, Medicare, health care, and prescription drugs still form the core of what concerns many older voters, John Hishta, the senior vice president for campaigns at AARP, told Newell. But as the body count mounts, so has concern for their own health and well-being with the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s slack response.
Lori McCammon of Alma, Wisconsin, may never vote for a Republican again. It was one thing to vote for him when she lived in Southern California. She was concerned about illegal immigration and “just didn’t like her” (Hillary Clinton). Now 65, McCammon thinks Trump guilty of “voluntary manslaughter” in the deaths of the tens of thousands who have died from COVID-19.
Reassembling Obama’s 2008 coalition of young, Latino, and Black voters has been a pipe dream for Democrats ever since. Democrats would like to increase turnout among Americans under 45, a largely untapped reservoir of votes, as I have noted here (and image above). If they reach out and take the power that is demographically theirs, they basically run this joint, college-loan forgiveness, Green New Deal and all. But the Biden-Harris ticket is not likely to inspire them as Obama did, even as critical as this election is, even with the Gulf Coast under water and the West Coast on fire.
Republican strategist Terry Sullivan tells Newell that given that turnout imbalance, “a point or two amongst older voters is worth three or four or five with younger voters.”
I’ll take it.
Newell concludes:
As it looks today, Biden will, like Obama, win young voters, Black voters, and Hispanic voters by wide margins, though not necessarily as wide. But unlike Obama, who twice lost white voters with college degrees, Biden is leading with that group by upward of 20 percentage points. Meanwhile, 65-plus voters were Obama’s worst age demographic in both 2008 and 2012. There’s now a chance that Biden could win them.
In Allerton, Iowa, Sondra Wolfe just lost her husband Mike, 66, to COVID-19. Five children, 17 grandchildren. “No one in my 21 years of journalism has sent me a photo like this,” Brooke Baldwin of CNN said of Mike’s wooden urn now sitting in the chair where he once “snuggled with the kids” and played “tickle monster” with them. “People see the numbers and so many of them don’t care,” Wolfe said. She wants to put an image to people’s grief.
“It’s so frustrating. It makes me angry, ” Sondra said. “The leader of our country who should have acted. Other countries have this under control and are protecting their citizens. And that they’ve made this political and about an election and about ratings just makes me angry. This is about our people. And lives.”
But not to a former reality TV star with no prior experience or interest in public service. Everything is about him. Their deaths make him look bad, and that’s all.
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