Is the GOP Finally Losing Older Voters?

The policies of today's Republican Party increasingly have little to offer voters who are not either (i) very wealthy and worried only about lower taxes, (ii) "Christian" extremists who want to force their beliefs on all Americans and erase LGBT citizens, or (iii) white supremacists who want to strip minorities of voting rights or oppose an accurate recounting of history in the nation's schools.  Younger voters have figured this out and by a heavy margin vote Democrat.  As a piece in the New York Times lays out, there are indications that older voters are belatedly waking up to the reality that the GOP agenda has little to offer them or may even pose a threat to their financial security.  Republican threats to cause the nation to default on its debts in the current debt ceiling fight would weak havoc on retirement accounts as would demands to slash Social Security and Medicare.  More seniors are asking themselves why should they vote for Republicans who threaten their security and want to also trash the planet so tht the fossil fuel industry can continue to make obscene profits.  Here are column excepts:

Is it time to call the next election “the most important in American history”? Probably. It seems like it may involve a judgment on democracy itself. Americans with a lot of history will play a key role in determining its outcome.

And judging in part by November’s midterms, they may not play the role that older voters are usually assigned. We at Third Act, the group we helped form in 2021, think older Americans are beginning a turn in the progressive direction, a turn that will accelerate as time goes on.

A lot has been written about the impact of young voters in November’s contests, and rightly so. The enormous margins that Democrats ran up among voters under 30 let them squeak through in race after race. Progressives should be incredibly grateful that the next generation can see straight through Trumpism in a way too many of their elders can’t.

But there were also intriguing hints of what looked like a gray countercurrent that helped damp the expected red wave. Yes, older people by and large voted Republican . . . . But in the 63 most competitive congressional districts, the places where big money was spent on ads and where the margin in the House was decided, polling by AARP, an advocacy group for people over 50, found some fascinating numbers.

In early summer, Republicans had a sturdy lead among older voters in 50 of those districts, up 50 percent to 40 percent. Those had Republicans salivating. But on Election Day, voters over 65 actually broke for Democrats in those districts, 49 to 46.

That doesn’t surprise us at Third Act. . . . . Some of the issues that benefited Democrats are obvious, of course. Republican messaging included calls for weakening Social Security and Medicare even though most older beneficiaries rely on Social Security for most of their income, and for an estimated 40 percent it’s all their retirement income. The cruelty of toying with people’s life support systems is matched only by its political foolishness. Among voters 65 and over, Social Security and Medicare were among the top concerns.

But something else happened, too. When the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade in early summer, most of the pictures were of young women protesting . . . . But people we know in their 60s and 70s felt a real psychic upheaval: A woman’s right to choose had been part of their mental furniture for five decades. And they’ve lived their entire lives in what they had imagined was a stable and working democracy.

The top concern to voters 65 and over, especially women, was “threats to democracy,” according to AARP. And exit polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among women 50 and older, the court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion had a major impact on which candidate they supported. . . . Voters who said the Supreme Court’s abortion decision was the single most important factor in their vote supported Democrats by a margin of 2 to 1.

And it’s not only abortion: The Supreme Court also took on the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We helped win these fights once, turning out by the tens of millions to oppose the war in Vietnam or for the first Earth Day. And we can help win them again — we have the muscle memory of what organizing on a big scale feels like.

With the election past, Third Act is now digging into work on climate change — in particular targeting the big American banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America) that are also the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry. On March 21 we’ll be cutting up bank credit cards and picketing bank branches across the country.

But here’s the thing. Many of us are going to be here for quite a while. Ten thousand Americans turn 60 every day, and on average we’ll live another 23 years. The last of the baby boomers, will be 65 or older in 2030. Youth voters, moreover, are youth voters for only about a decade. One guarantee for 2024: We’ll vote in huge numbers, as we always do. One possibility is that we’ll help turn back the clock a little, toward the world we actually built in our youth.  We’re not your parent’s grandparents.