The GOP has been flailing a little in recent weeks, as an election once expected to be a typical midterm blowout has tightened considerably. If the GOP expects that older voters will bail them out as in elections past, our advice is, think again.
The folk wisdom, of course, is that older voters are more conservative — an idea with at least some statistical support. There is an entire media ecosystem geared to rattling the fears of us older people. At Fox News, where the median viewer age is generally put at 68, there’s always some new scary myth (migrant invasions, antifa rioters). And there’s also the widespread sense that the old hearken back to some more homogenized past — as one commentator hewing to the stereotype put it recently, “The people who historically turn out (to vote) are older white folks who long for the good ol' days when a man could support his family, and those uppity (insert invective here) knew their place.”
But those assumptions don’t survive a brush with the data, at least not in this election cycle. It’s true that older voters backed Donald Trump in 2016, but that support began to wane considerably in 2020; earlier this year some pollsters started noticing a pronounced shift. And if you look at the cross tabs of recent surveys, you find some fascinating results.
