Biden's senior momentum: Why he's courting older voters
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President Biden appears to be making serious inroads with America's oldest voters — and could become the first Democrat to win the demographic in over two decades.
Why it matters: If current polling pans out, November's election between two historically old candidates would upend long-held assumptions about how Americans vote.
The big picture: The Biden campaign is attempting to seal the support of a group that consistently votes at higher rates than any other demographic.
- Former President Trump, as Axios reported yesterday, appears to be making stunning gains of his own among young voters.
- The polls could still be wrong. But unlike young voters, older Americans still (sometimes) answer their phones, making them easier to reliably poll.
Zoom in: Older Americans — perhaps driven by old-school respect for institutions and distaste for Trump's unorthodox style — are flocking to Biden, according to a series of recent polls. (Another theory: The hippies got old.)
- The most recent New York Times/Siena poll shows that Biden has a 9-point lead in a head-to-head matchup against Trump among likely voters aged 65 or older.
- In a Quinnipiac University poll released last month, Biden is beating Trump by 12 points with the 65+ set.
- Republicans have — with the exception of 1992, 1996 and 2000 — won the senior vote in every presidential race for the last half-century, according to exit polls.
Preserving democracy has emerged as one of the clearest dividing lines between younger and older voters.
- When asked by Quinnipiac to identify "the most urgent issue facing the country today," 10% of registered voters aged 18-34 said democracy.
- For those 65 and up, that number rose to 35% — higher than any other single issue including the economy and immigration.
State of play: Biden — who has torn into Republicans for eyeing cuts to Social Security and Medicare — is making a play at older voters with a new program announced this week called Seniors for Biden-Harris.
- The outreach effort includes bingo nights and pickleball tournaments. The campaign is running ads on daytime TV shows that are popular with seniors, including "The Price is Right."
Biden campaign pollster Geoff Garin pointed to two key factors going for the president with older voters:
- "First, older voters strongly support what Biden has done to lower drug costs for seniors on Medicare," he told Axios.
- "Second, older voters pay much more attention to the news than any other group, so they are the most aware of any group of how unhinged and extreme Donald Trump has become."
Between the lines: Biden's gains with older voters could be valuable in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the so-called "blue wall" swing states in the Rust Belt that his campaign badly wants to hold onto.
- Those three states, which would likely give Biden the 270 electoral votes he needs to win, skew older than the Sun Belt swing states that he won in 2020: Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
