There has been a lot of chatter during the early phases of the 2024 presidential contest about Joe Biden’s struggles to secure support from the young voters who were crucial to his victory over Donald Trump in 2020. Can he convince them that his economic policies actually benefit them, or that Trump is a threat to their freedoms, or that a vote for a third-party or independent candidate is a Trump-enabling waste of time? Can he overcome their unhappiness with his support for Israel’s war in Gaza? Most of all, can he motivate millennial and Gen-Z voters to turn out and vote for an 81-year-old president who was in the U.S. Senate long before they were born? A lot may depend on the answers to those questions.
But there is a demographic group of voters who are disproportionately sure to show up at the polls in November and who by some measures are more favorably inclined toward Biden than youngsters. That would be Biden’s fellow geezers. And even if seniors don’t actually give Biden a plurality of their votes over that other geezer Donald Trump, a pro-Democrat trend among them could offset weakness in other parts of the electorate. As Ron Brownstein pointed out in December, this could be the “silver lining” associated with Biden’s age:
The major data sources on voting behavior — including the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN and the calculations by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm — all agree that Biden narrowly lost seniors to Donald Trump in 2020.
But the same data sources agreed that Biden improved slightly over Hillary Clinton’s performance with older voters in 2016. In office, many polls have found that Biden has maintained more of his support among seniors than among other age groups, particularly young people.
Getting a fix on the senior vote isn’t easy, since many pollsters don’t release age-based crosstabs, and some slice-and-dice age cohorts differently (e.g., measuring “over 60” voters or even “over and under 45” voters) in ways that make comparisons difficult. Polling variation is also common among the narrower voting categories thanks to small sample size. For example, a late-March national Marist poll of registered voters for NPR-PBS that showed Biden leading Trump by two points in a head-to-head contest gave the incumbent an eight-point lead (53 to 45 percent) among baby boomers and a two-point lead (48 to 46 percent) among the older silent- and greatest-generation voters. And a mid-March national Selzer poll of likely voters for Grinnell College showed Biden leading Trump by 11 points (49 to 38 percent) among over-65 voters even though Trump led the overall contest by seven points (45 to 38 percent). But a slightly earlier national YouGov poll of registered voters for Yahoo that showed a statistically tied head-to-head race gave Trump an 11-point lead (53 to 42 percent) among over-65 voters.
There’s also a significant amount of polling showing old folks giving the octogenarian president relatively good job-approval ratings. An Economist-YouGov national survey of adults released earlier this week showed over-65 voters giving Biden the highest approval ratings (albeit a less-than-sensational 43 percent of any age cohort). Similarly, in a national CNN poll of registered voters in late January, over-65 voters gave Biden a 47 percent approval rating, compared to 38 percent overall. More generally and consistently, Gallup’s monthly job-approval rating surveys show above-average approval for Biden among over-65 voters dating back to March of 2022.
Another feature of the senior vote that is noticeable in the polls this year is that old folks are less interested in third options like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The aforementioned late-March Marist poll showed 20 percent of Gen-Z and millennial voters opting for a non-major-party candidate. That percentage dropped to 9 among baby boomers and 7 percent among silent- and greatest-generation voters.
In terms of issues affecting voting preferences, it’s worth knowing there’s a significant generation gap in attitudes toward Israel’s war in Gaza, as Pew explained in a major December 2023 survey:
Younger Americans are more likely than older adults to say that Israel’s current military operation against Hamas is going too far: 38% of adults under 35 say this, compared with smaller shares of those 35 to 49 (27%), 50 to 64 (23%) and 65 and older (16%).
Positive as all these indicators are for Democrats and for Biden, they could improve at a crucial moment this autumn, as Brownstein noted:
[A] date that some Democrats are already circling on the election calendar is September 1, 2024. That’s when the administration is scheduled to announce the results of the first-ever negotiations between Medicare and large pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices. The outcome could be substantial savings for seniors on 10 drugs taken by millions of Medicare recipients – announced only a little over two months before Election Day. And that’s just one component of an interlocked agenda on controlling drug and health care costs that could provide Biden a powerful calling card with older voters as it snaps into effect in the months ahead.
It remains important for Democrats to bring younger Americans back into the fold, and there are grounds for optimism on that score as millennial and Gen-Z voters predictably sour on non-major-party candidates, while remembering who Donald Trump is and perhaps securing different Middle East policies from the Biden administration. But there could be gold in the silver-haired segments of the electorate as well.
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Trump vs. Biden Polls: Will Old Folks Save Joe?
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06.04.2024
There has been a lot of chatter during the early phases of the 2024 presidential contest about Joe Biden’s struggles to secure support from the young voters who were crucial to his victory over Donald Trump in 2020. Can he convince them that his economic policies actually benefit them, or that Trump is a threat to their freedoms, or that a vote for a third-party or independent candidate is a Trump-enabling waste of time? Can he overcome their unhappiness with his support for Israel’s war in Gaza? Most of all, can he motivate millennial and Gen-Z voters to turn out and vote for an 81-year-old president who was in the U.S. Senate long before they were born? A lot may depend on the answers to those questions.
But there is a demographic group of voters who are disproportionately sure to show up at the polls in November and who by some measures are more favorably inclined toward Biden than youngsters. That would be Biden’s fellow geezers. And even if seniors don’t actually give Biden a plurality of their votes over that other geezer Donald Trump, a pro-Democrat trend among them could offset weakness in other parts of the electorate. As Ron Brownstein pointed out in December, this could be the “silver lining” associated with Biden’s age:
The major data sources on voting behavior — including the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN and the calculations by........
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