David Frum: Republican Advantage Among Older Voters Won’t Last

Today's Republican Party relies disproportionately on angry, aging white voters to put it over the finish line in many political races.  Meanwhile, GOP policies seemingly go out of their way to alienate other voters, especially minority voters and LGBT voters and the young who support diversity and equality.  David Frum - one of the few relatively sane conservatives not yet fully driven from the GOP - says that the GOP is deluding itself if it believes that its lock on older voters will hold over the longer term .  Here are excerpts from a piece Frum wrote in The Atlantic:

Republicans are expected to score gains in 2014 because of their advantage among older voters, the voters most likely to turn out in midterm elections. That advantage has appeared surprisingly recently—and there is reason to think it won’t last long.

The emergence of the older voters as a massively solid Republican bloc is a post-Obama phenomenon.

The Pew survey explained the trend in a 2011 report. The Silent Generation that voted for Bush in 1988 had retained its conservatism into its retirement years. No news there. The news was among the next cohort, the Baby Boomers: After the year 2000, the Woodstock generation veered abruptly to the right.

These trends explain the present. But they don’t predict the future.  As human life extends, it no longer makes sense to think of 65 as “old age.” We live in the age of the 65-year-old marathon runner, the 65-year-old rock star, and the 65-year-old new father.

Old age comes later now. But when it comes, it changes people in the same way it always did. Women begin radically to outnumber men. (In 2010, the older-than-80 population included 4 million males and 7.2 million females). Personal savings are exhausted. (Average net worth drops by 25 percent between age 65 and age 75.) Dependency rises. Attitudes to government change.

The older you get, the more you appreciate Social Security and Medicare …and the more you mistrust proposals for reform that might affect current recipients.

As one very successful political operative told me, “The No. 1 concern of every voter over 80 is, ‘Will my check arrive on time?'”

Cultural conservatism appeals strongly to the elderly. The bold economic individualism espoused by so many in the Republican Party since 2009? Not so much. A 501(c)4 group closely connected to GOP leaders and donors conducted a series of focus groups in spring 2012 among older independents in Michigan and Florida, two states Mitt Romney hoped to win. These voters strongly endorsed the entitlements status quo and opposed any changes that would affect them personally. They refused to believe that Medicare caused deficits. (They blamed “wars” instead.)

There will soon be a lot more people digging in against benefits changes. The elderly population is poised to grow hugely quickly; the oldest of the old to grow faster still.  

As the old become older, they become more female. As they become more female, they become more supportive of government’s social-welfare role—and thus more strongly Democratic.