Most powerful people in U.S. politics: Older voters
LAS VEGAS» Joe Biden wasn’t accustomed to overflow audiences.
It was a Tuesday night in February and Biden had limped into Las Vegas, bruised from his disappointing showings in the Iowa and New Hampshire nominating contests. But at Harbor Palace Seafood Restaurant, a dim sum spot here, a crowd of retirees had gathered to see the 77year-old former vice president, forming a line that snaked out the door.
“I don’t like Warren and I don’t like Bernie, because they want ‘Medicare for All,’ ” said Alan Davis, 80, dismissing the single-payer health care system promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78. “I’m totally against it. I have a good health plan.”
Biden is “really human. He can feel how an ordinary person feels,” said Minerva Honkala, a retired teacher who identified herself as “65-plus.”
Biden’s ability to connect with Honkala’s age group — through his résumé and more centrist tendencies, his talk of shared values and his perceived general election promise — helped him regain his footing in Nevada, surge to victory in South Carolina and catapult to his perch as the likely Democratic nominee. It was a rapid reversal of fortunes fueled by overwhelming support first from older black voters and, ultimately, from older voters more broadly, a key part of his larger coalition.
Now that age group is top of mind for many Americans as the nation confronts the staggering costs of the coronavirus crisis. It’s a vulnerable population in terms of the outbreak — and has become the focus of the public conversation. Health officials are pleading for young people to stay home to protect their parents and grandparents, while in Texas, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor, suggested that older people might be willing to take risks to protect the economy, sparking a national controversy.
But politically, the primary results this election season have highlighted the extraordinary, sustained power of older Americans: Exit polls, surveys and interviews with political strategists and demographers show that the concerns and preferences of these voters have played a critical role in defining the trajectory of the Democratic race so far, and are poised to do so in the general election as well.
In Florida, a state with a significant retiree population, Biden won the Democratic primary by nearly 40 percentage points, a reflection of both his momentum in the race and his strength with constituencies including more moderate Latino voters, African-americans and college-educated white suburbanites. Among voters age 65 and over, Biden’s advantage was even starker: He was the choice of 70% of those voters, while 5% said the same of Sanders, according to a National Election Pool pre-election survey of Florida voters.
“Older voters, after African-american voters, have been the single most important constituency for Joe Biden,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster and political strategist who works with the Biden team but spoke in her personal capacity.
Younger voters have had “tremendous influence” in shaping the contours of the Democratic debate, pushing boldly progressive ideas on matters such as student loan debt reform to the fore, said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.
When it comes to electoral outcomes, however, young people are being outflanked. “Rather than increasing their influence in 2020, what’s happened is, their parents and grandparents have increased their influence,” he said.
Those Democratic grandparents, especially, tend to be more moderate, more swayed by traditional government experience and more keenly focused on the tactics they believe are needed to defeat President Donald Trump, strategists and pollsters said.
Biden, who once faced significant competition for older Americans, emerged in recent weeks as the dominant front-runner among those highly committed Democratic voters who have now helped bring him to the cusp of his party’s presidential nomination.
Older voters have punched above their political weight for years, with turnout among those 65 and older often double, or more, that of the youngest voters. As Americans age and become more rooted in their communities, political participation tends to rise with their stake in society.
Even in the midterm elections in 2018, hailed as a high-water mark for youth voting because the share of 18- to 24-year-olds nearly doubled from the previous midterm election, the gap with older voters remained about the same. About 66% of eligible older people turned out, compared with about 36% of 18- to 24-yearolds, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
“There’s no magic age for becoming a regular voter,” said Carroll Doherty, director of political research at the Pew Research Center. “But when people move into their 40s, that’s when you see voter turnout grow.”
Certainly, Sanders, the overwhelming favorite with younger voters, is continuing to campaign. And while the Vermont senator has acknowledged that younger voters did not appear to turn out at the rate he had hoped for, polls and exit surveys show that Biden faces major challenges with that constituency, a liberal slice of the electorate that, his advisers acknowledge, he will need to energize if he is the nominee.
His standing with older voters is also poised to look different in a general election, where that demographic is again influential — but traditionally has tilted much more conservative.
“The irony is that the pattern is about to reverse in the general,” Lake said, pointing to Trump’s overall strength with older voters, even as she added that “Donald Trump is despised by younger voters.”
The virus has thrown politics completely, and unpredictably, up in the air. What will happen in Florida’s retirement communities — some of the most vulnerable in the nation to the virus — if Trump’s push to reopen the country fast comes to pass? It’s a question with potentially partisan implications.
Older people have long leaned Republican. A majority have chosen Republicans in four of the last seven presidential elections, according to Frey.
Older voters favored Trump in 2016. In Pennsylvania, they preferred him by a 10-point margin, Frey said. In all, 52% of older people — and 58% of white seniors — voted for Trump in 2016, Frey said.
Older Americans will soon be even more important. Frey noted that the large baby boom generation has only just begun entering the older American voting bloc. He has calculated that the number of senior eligible voters will rise to 68 million in 2028 from 47 million in 2016.