By wooing older voters, the candidates were simply trying to get the most bang for their campaign buck. Politically informed and active, seniors are the demographic group most likely to show up at the polls. In 1996, two thirds of those aged 65 and older voted. And while Americans 65 and over made up 16.5 percent of the voting-age population that year, they accounted for 20.3 percent of those going to the polls. As a result, seniors have political pull disproportionate to their numbers.
For most of the 20th century, that activisim was good news for the Democrats. “Typically the senior vote has been the most Democratic of any cohort,” says Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, “and that’s true not just in Florida but across the country.” No more. “The era of allegiance to one party is pretty much gone,” says the AARP’s Rother.
That shift showed in election results this year. Older Americans still voted for Gore by the largest margin of any age range, picking him by a 51 to 47 margin nationwide and helping him win key states including California and Pennsylvania. But overall, Gore won the senior vote in 26 states and the District of Columbia, while Bush took it in 23 states. The two tied among older voters in Arkansas. And data from the Voter News Service, a consortium run by television networks and the Associated Press, show that Bush won among Florida seniors, 51 to 47.
What’s responsible for the shifting loyalties? Seniors who came of age during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and developed a resulting loyalty to FDR’s party are beginning to die. The next generation is a very different one. “The younger ones coming into the 65-plus category are more likely to be better off, better educated and more mixed in their partisan affiliation,” says MacManus.
Not only that, but voters now entering their golden years are more likely than those of past generations to care about a broader mix of issues, including traditionally Republican subjects such as family values and tax cuts. They are also less likely to oppose Social Security and Medicare reforms. And they’re not necessarily abandoning party loyalties as their concerns and their addresses change. Florida’s voting breakdown is instructive: seniors in Florida’s southeast region were as solidly Democratic as the Northeastern states they mostly hail from, while seniors on the Gulf Coast, who tend to be younger and from Midwestern states, went for Bush.
The political lesson? Neither party can take the senior vote for granted. And the job of wooing these voters will only become more significant over time. In 1995, seniors comprised 15 percent of the vote in five of America’s states. The number in 2025? A whopping 48 states. The math there is anything but fuzzy.
