Swinging Seniors: Older Voters Are Still Up for Grabs in 2024
Move over soccer moms and millennials: Grandma and Grandpa just may prove to be the key swing voters of 2024.
Though attention has been lavished lately on young voters’ allegiances and their need for housing and student debt relief, old folks stand today as the most engaged and powerful demographic in a fractured electorate. The nation’s population of senior citizens is growing faster than any other age group, they are disproportionately represented in this year’s key swing states, and they vote in higher proportions than anyone else.
In a race where, broadly speaking, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris figures to do well among young voters and Republican Donald Trump shows strength among the middle-aged, the balance could well lie with senior citizens.
“There’s a fight, tooth and nail, for these voters, no doubt about it,” says Tony Fabrizio, the main pollster for the Trump campaign.
Surveys suggest that, after a summer of swaying back and forth, those senior voters are up for grabs. They first leaned toward Democrat Joe Biden, then shifted quickly away from him after his disastrous early-summer debate against Trump. With Harris now atop the Democratic ticket, seniors appear closely divided. Taken together, the last two Wall Street Journal national polls show Harris and Trump in a statistical tie among those aged 65 and over.
The power of the senior vote is a result of the graying of America, a trend whose implications stretch far beyond one election. The population aged 65 and over grew nearly five times faster than the total population in the 100 years from 1920 to 2020, according to the Census Bureau. This cohort reached 55.8 million in 2020, meaning it made up 16.8% of the nation’s total population. By 2050, it is expected to reach 23%.
This population isn’t merely bigger than ever before; it’s also different. As a group, senior citizens today are more racially diverse and better educated than ever before, and they are working longer.
They also are politically engaged. “They vote,” says Democratic pollster John Anzalone. “They show up. They are the biggest age tranche and they come out.”
Indeed, in every presidential election since 1996, older voters have had the highest turnout of any demographic, and the margin is getting bigger. According to data compiled by the U.S. Elections Project, in 1996 66% of those 60 and over voted. By 2020, the figure had risen to 78%.
This year, AARP has commissioned a series of swing-state polls that underscore the trend. In Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin, those aged 50 and over were found to be the most committed to voting this fall. Thus, wooing an older voter may be a wiser investment for a campaign than wooing a younger voter, because that older voter is a far better bet to show up at election time.
That’s particularly true in the small number of states that figure to determine the outcome of the presidential race, where the population trends older than it does in the nation as a whole. Four of those swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona—are among the 20 states with the highest share of population aged 65 and over.
The importance of older voters may have been best illustrated in the collapse of support for President Biden in the wake of the June debate with Trump. Before that debate, older voters were a kind of secret weapon for Biden. People aged 65 and above had been generally supportive of Trump in 2016 and 2020, but had moved toward Biden in significant numbers.
Immediately after the debate, the 65-and-older crowd pivoted. In the WSJ poll, they went from supporting Biden by 2 percentage points in February to backing Trump by 11 percentage points immediately after the debate. More broadly, those aged 50 and above went from backing Trump by 4 percentage points to backing him by 12 points. That accounted for most of the collapse of support for Biden this summer.
Since then, Democrats and the newly energized Harris campaign have clawed back toward parity among senior citizens. Democrats think the Biden administration’s work to serve older Americans leaves Harris well-positioned. In particular, they point to the administration’s steps to reduce the cost of insulin; its effort to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers to lower the cost of other drugs provided through Medicare; and the implementation next year of a $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs.
Meanwhile, Trump made his own explicit appeal to seniors’ pocketbooks a few weeks ago when he proposed to exempt all Social Security payments from income taxes. He’s also ruled out raising the retirement age to ease financial pressures on Social Security and Medicare. In addition, the Trump campaign calculates that older voters are more concerned than are younger ones about illegal immigration, one of his main issues. The campaign is translating those messages into television and mail ads targeted specifically at senior citizens in swing states.
There’s nothing monolithic about the older vote, of course, and the fluctuations this summer leave pollsters on both sides thinking sentiments haven’t settled in. There is also a gender gap among older voters, just as there is among younger voters. Older men are more likely to support Trump while older women are more likely to back Harris.
Whoever wins in November, the political power of seniors is likely to have important policy implications long after this election. For example, Social Security’s trustees project the program’s trust fund will become insolvent in 2033, and Medicare’s trustees project the same fate for its main trust fund in 2036. But with this year’s campaign pushing both parties further away from reforming the major entitlement programs, it isn’t clear what the country’s lead-ers will do after the election to shore them up. Today’s unwillingness to ask more of seniors means that the likeliest solution will be to divert funds from elsewhere, continuing a trend toward shifting national resources from younger Americans to older ones.
Seniors also have seen their net worth rise faster and farther in recent years than younger people. That may presage tax and inheritance policies, in Washington and state capitals, that are friendlier to them.
The political influence of seniors is likely to grow even stronger in the decades ahead. Not only is the population growing older, but as the MIT Technology Review recently reported, “A few key areas of research suggest that we might be able to push human lifespans further, and potentially reverse at least some signs of aging.” Gerald F. Seib, the Journal’s former executive Washington editor and Capital Journal columnist, now serves as a visiting fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.
‘They show up. They are the biggest age tranche and they come out.’
JOHN ANZALONE Democratic pollster
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