As President Joe Biden‘s reputation has dipped among younger citizens, he’s outpacing past Democratic presidential hopefuls with the same demographic, senior citizens, who regularly vote to the right of the general public.
A string of polls show the president leading former President Donald Trump among the over 65 crowd, and though carrying seniors alone wo n’t help Biden overcome issues surrounding his 2020 base, they do offer a degree of security in battlegrounds like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
According to Adam Geller, a Democratic poll and CEO of National Research Inc., “hippie aunts” aging into the 65 and older statistical contribute to the senior citizens ‘ left swing.
” Tomorrow’s seniors are today’s hippies, and so I subscribe to the idea that the Vietnam War activists of the 1960s are tomorrow’s 65- plus citizens. Younger seniors let’s contact them, and fresh seniors are still fairly liberal”, he stated. ” It’s just the development of millennial politics”.
Exit polls for 2020 revealed that Biden and Trump had 48 % of the senior vote, making this the strongest performance by a Democratic candidate among voters over 65 in nearly 20 years. Fast forth to 2024, and recent surveys from the New York Times, Quinnipiac University, CNN, and the Daily Kos then indicate that Biden is now ahead of Trump by a ratio of up to 22 factors among older citizens. In surveys conducted by Fox News and Echelon Insights, Biden continues to trail Trump among elderly.
Even with the country’s centrist force in the 2022 midterm elections, Biden’s campaign thinks that the president’s equivalent popularity with seniors could support Democrats move beyond conventional swing states and broaden the map to get Florida for the first time since 2012.
According to Biden campaign spokesman Charles Lutvak,” Donald Trump is proud to be running on a record of threatening Social Security and Medicare,” and if he has the chance, he will repeal the law that President Biden passed to lower the cost of prescription drugs and insulin for seniors. The stakes are higher than ever for November. Our team is working with these key voters across the battleground states to earn their support every day because President Biden has a proven track record for seniors, in contrast to Trump’s failing campaign.
Trump suggested in a March interview he’s open to changing entitlement programs for senior citizens, saying,” There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements”. He later walked back those comments in a separate interview, pledging,” I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare”, Trump said.
Despite having been shown numerous times in polls this cycle, Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst and managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, made no attempt to wager on data showing Biden gaining ground among seniors and Trump picking up young and black voters.
Kondik contends that voters of all demographics may be reluctant to speak to pollsters or take surveys for a variety of reasons, just like polls did in 2016 did. Usually, participants are among the most plugged- in voters across the country, on both sides of the aisle.
We are skeptical of poll findings that suggest Trump is winning black voters over the long term or making historic strides in this area. We are also skeptical of poll findings that indicate Biden will win the party and/or that suggest 65+ voters will cast blue, he wrote on April 4.
The 2024 presidential election is likely to be very close and competitive, and there is likely to be a lot of continuity between this election and what took place in 2016 and 2020, when Trump was on the ballot each time and Biden was on the ballot in the latter election, Kondik said.
Geller, a Trump pollster in 2016 and 2020, says Biden’s apparent support from seniors is to be expected.
” It does n’t mean doom and gloom for Republicans. It just means that this has happened”, Geller said. It’s not a foregone conclusion that Joe Biden’s disastrous policies have had an impact on them. Some of them he is bankrupting, making them even more dangerous. So it’s not to say that it’s a done deal. It goes without saying that a senior from 15 years ago is n’t the same as a senior today, and that there is more to a senior than meets the eye.
Biden’s growing popularity with baby boomers can be traced to his efforts to lower healthcare costs for older people, which has earned him the support of the Alliance of Retired Americans. He is 81 years old and will be 82 when he is sworn in for a potential second term in office.
The president has made Medicare and Social Security a key component of his reelection campaign, dating back to his 2023 State of the Union speech, while claiming that Trump and Republican lawmakers are proposing to reduce funding for those programs. Biden also touts his administration’s efforts to lower the costs of prescription drugs, including the$ 35 cap placed on monthly insulin prescriptions, and freed up$ 37 billion in federal grants to promote independent living services for seniors in all 50 states.
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In a Tuesday speech at Union Station, the president discussed his plans to expand the healthcare industry.
” Seniors and people with disabilities, we’re going to expand Medicaid Home Care Services and reduce that 700, 000 person backlog”, Biden told the crowd of care workers. That would make it possible for more people to live and work independently in their own neighborhoods. More home care workers will start receiving better pay, benefits, and the respect they deserve.
