President Joe Biden is just months away from his electoral rematch with former President Donald Trump, and he’s looking to woo a group of voters he knows well: seniors. At 81, Biden’s age remains a key factor heading into November, and most data shows that his electoral base has seemingly flipped from the 2020 election; while Biden garnered large swaths of the youth vote four years ago, it is now the elderly that are supporting him in greater numbers.
Three seniors groups have endorsed Biden for president, and the White House has officially launched its Seniors for Biden-Harris coalition. First reported by NBC News, this coalition will be a “national organizing initiative to leverage what it sees as key advantages among those voters,” with events including postcard writing, bingo nights and pickleball tournaments. First lady Dr. Jill Biden and second gentleman Douglas Emhoff are among those pushing the initiative.
With Biden and Trump nearly neck-and-neck in most polls, the question remains: Will the president’s appeal to seniors put him over the edge at the ballot box? Or will it end up making little headway for his reelection efforts?
What did the commentators say?
Age is an “unmistakable part of the bitterly contested race for the White House,” said Jeff Zeleny and Eric Bradner for CNN. But while the Biden campaign has long attempted to paint the president in a more youthful light, it is “suddenly embracing age in a different way by turning to seniors … to build a critical piece of his coalition.” While “other parts of the Biden coalition are fraying, the campaign is putting a renewed focus on seniors to volunteer and vote,” and the “contrast with Trump is what the Biden campaign is investing millions on television ads targeting some favorite programs of seniors, including ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and the local news.”
Biden’s ability to court seniors is key because “Americans ages 65 and older turn out at significantly higher rates than younger voters do, giving them outsize clout as they choose this year” between Biden and Trump, said Ken Thomas and Dante Chinni for The Wall Street Journal. But Biden remains steadily in the lead with seniors for now, which “has a few possible explanations: The president has been performing well among Americans who are closely monitoring the election, giving him an advantage with seniors who actively consume cable television and news coverage in their retirement.” Additionally, “some polling has shown seniors with more favorable views of Biden’s handling of the economy.”
Another notable factor is that today’s seniors grew up in the 1960s and include “those who marched against the war and fought for women’s rights, civil rights and environmental protection,” Jacob Geanous and Jonathan D. Salant said for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Traditionally, older voters “had come of age in the post-World War II economic boom under two-term GOP President Dwight Eisenhower.” But new seniors are “more inclined to vote Democratic than other older voters. The seniors are more Democratic as the baby boomers fill out the senior ranks,” Bob Ward, a partner at the polling firm Fabrizio Ward, said to the Post-Gazette.
In reality, though, a “feeling of dramatic movement among older voters toward Biden may be overstated,” Matt Grossmann, the director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, said to the Journal. Instead, it “may be that older voters don’t seem to be moving toward Trump while other groups are.” While polling provides a snapshot, it is “hard to compare changes in voting habits among age groups over time” across multiple election cycles. But “one hypothesis for why older voters look more likely to support Biden may be that older voters are less concerned about Biden’s age.”
What next?
If seniors vote as expected in November, the election “between two historically old candidates would upend long-held assumptions about how Americans vote,” said Axios. This rings especially true given that “preserving democracy has emerged as one of the clearest dividing lines between younger and older voters.”
Meanwhile, Jill Biden and Emhoff are both busy on their aforementioned campaign stops to woo seniors. During these events, the pair are trying to highlight the “work of the Biden-Harris administration to protect programs like Social Security and Medicare,” said the Green Bay Press-Gazette.