WILMINGTON, Del. — While Democrats worry about losing ground with young voters in November, the Biden campaign is increasingly encouraged by an opposite trend — a swing among the nation’s oldest voters in favor of the nation’s oldest president.
A wave of recent polls shows support for the president waning Joe Biden among some traditionally solidly Democratic constituencies — not just young voters, but also black and Latino voters. Still, some of the same surveys show Biden gaining a lead among voters 65 and older, a trend that, if it continues through November, would make him the first Democrat to win the seniors since Al Gore in 2000.
With that in mind, the campaign on Tuesday is launching Seniors for Biden-Harris, a national organizing initiative to leverage what it sees as key advantages among those voters, a campaign spokesperson said. Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff will help launch the effort with an event Friday in New Hampshire, the battleground state with the highest percentage of residents 65 and older, the campaign spokesman said.
First lady Jill Biden will also boost outreach in the coming weeks with state battleground events, along with other surrogates who will fan out for events such as postcard writing, phone banks and even pickleball tournaments, the spokesperson said.
Biden advisers and his Democratic allies offer several explanations for the recent shift among older voters, including some factors they say also explain declining support among other groups.
They say older voters are much more likely to consume traditional media, such as newspapers and network news broadcasts, than the youngest voters; younger voters are increasingly being tapped or getting information from places like TikTok. An NBC News poll in April showed Biden with a more than 50-point lead among newspaper readers but trailing by 26 points among voters who said they did not follow political news.
Biden advisers also believe that his argument for freedom and democracy particularly resonates with a generation of voters who lived through the post-World War II and Cold War eras. Biden aides have said his democracy speech in France last week was a deliberate echo of Ronald Reagan’s comments 40 years earlier, something that could resonate with former supporters of the Republican icon.
John Della Volpe, who has extensively researched young voters, said older voters have embraced Biden’s policies, such as lowering prescription drug costs, while younger voters are not seeing the same benefits.
“On the other hand, even though I believe he has delivered even more than people expected on younger people’s priorities — climate, gun violence, student debt — few have been able to see the tangible benefit of that,” he said. Della Volpe.
Biden traveled to New Hampshire ahead of Memorial Day to highlight the expanded benefits for veterans under the PACT Act, which he signed into law. He highlighted the story of Lisa Clark, an Air Force veteran who legally receives benefits after her husband, a combat engineer during the Vietnam War, died of cancer. He also greeted Clark’s 96-year-old father, a World War II veteran who was in the audience.
Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, D-N.H., said older voters in her state and elsewhere are attracted to Biden’s “steady hand.”
“They want someone with competence,” Kuster said. “They don’t like the volatility, and they don’t like the risk.” Kuster also said that older voters, who remember what the country was like before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, might now be motivated by the issue because it affects their daughters and their granddaughters.
The April NBC News poll found Biden and former President Donald Trump essentially tied among voters 18 to 29 in a head-to-head matchup. At the same time, Biden had a narrow lead among voters aged 65 and older, according to the poll.
While Trump won voters aged 65 and older by 7 percentage points in the 2016 election, Biden narrowed that gap to 5 points in 2020. Biden also won voters aged 18 to 29 by 24 percentage points in 2020, underscoring how important the constituency for his constituency. victory.
Both candidates are seniors themselves – Biden is 81 years old and Trump turns 78 on Friday.
The Biden campaign hopes to maintain its apparent momentum among older voters in part by contrasting Biden’s proposals for seniors with Trump’s policies.
Biden has criticized Republicans in his State of the Union address and at most stops since for proposals to scale back retirement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The Trump campaign says it is Biden who is putting these programs at risk because of lax immigration policies and that they would be bolstered by a stronger economy.
Biden has said expanding the so-called healthcare economy would be a focus of his second term, pledging to reinvigorate parts of his so-called Build Back Better agenda that failed to pass Congress during his first term. Vice President Kamala Harris focused on recruiting more healthcare workers for the elderly and disabled last month at an event at a Wisconsin nursing home.
“The stakes in this election couldn’t be higher for seniors: A second Trump presidency promises to all but undo the progress we’ve made and instead increase daily costs for seniors so Trump can appease his billionaire friends,” says Mia Ehrenberg, a Biden campaign spokesperson. “Seniors are a critical part of the Biden-Harris winning coalition in November, and the campaign is working every day to show up and earn their support.”
Biden was endorsed this year by the Alliance for Retired Americans, which runs weekly senior-to-senior phone banks and plans other events in battleground states.
Richard Fiesta, the organization’s executive director, said it also hopes to strengthen another major Biden initiative this fall, when the administration plans to announce lower prices for 10 prescription drugs negotiated through Medicare, a major part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Fiesta said the efforts will ideally help Biden more than just seniors. There has been “a lot of discussion about how to get the grandkids and the nieces and nephews to sit up and pay attention,” he said.
Della Volpe said what he calls a “zoomer-boomer” coalition of the youngest and oldest voters helped Biden win four years ago. But this year, “the boomers may have to carry a greater burden than their grandchildren,” he said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
