Older Voters Might Save Kamala Harris’s Bacon

In 2020, turnout for eligible voters aged 65 and older was 72 percent, higher than for any other age group. Old people’s greater propensity to vote, combined with the aging of the population, conspired to make over-65s the largest single age-based voting bloc in the 2022 midterms, constituting one-third of the total. Voters over 50 were 64 percent of the total. The much-studied under-30s were a mere 10 percent. In the 2020 election the percentages were only slightly less skewed upward (over-65s were 26 percent and under-30s were 16 percent). In elections, the elderly voter is king. As Mrs. Loman says in Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid to such a person.

So let’s pay attention. In 2020 Biden lost the over-65s by only three percentage points, 48–51. This was a huge advance. Hillary Clinton had lost this cohort by 9 percentage points in 2016, and President Barack Obama had lost them by six percentage points in 2012. Why the shift? I chalked it up to Trump’s self-destructive opposition to mail-in ballots and to Biden being, well, older.

Older voters have enabled our aging government. In a 2019 essay, I attributed America’s turning into a crabby gerontocracy to the growing power of the elderly vote. Our top political leaders, I noted, were a full six years older than the geriatric Soviet Politburo at which we used to guffaw. Older voters, I pointed out, were less concerned than their younger counterparts about racial discrimination, less enthusiastic about immigration, and less wrapped around the axle about climate change. Tellingly, they were also less capable of distinguishing fact from opinion. Too much Fox News! (Before you call me ageist, please note that I myself am 66.)