Mental Bloc Over Senior Voters

Every election year, politicians go out of their way to court older Americans. But some political scientists say seniors tend to vote the same way that everyone else does.
 
The chatter began almost as soon as the midterm elections ended: Pollsters, journalists, and pundits started predicting that older Americans would constitute "the most crucial voting bloc in 2004," as a Christian Science Monitor headline put it. With the passage of a Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003, the talking heads argued, President George W. Bush might have ensured his own reelection. American seniors had been complaining about rising drug prices for years, experts reasoned, and Bush's coverage plan would throw them a decisive electoral bone.
 
Yet political scientist Robert Binstock of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, calls the notion that senior citizens constitute a key electoral battleground a "perennial cliché." He and other political analysts--including Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate--question whether seniors' voting patterns differ significantly from those of any other age group. Gans and Binstock address the myth of the senior vote in this month's SAGE Crossroads Webcast, "The Coveted Voting Bloc: Older Americans."
 
The notion of senior citizens as an "800 pound gorilla" in American politics derives from a few facts. First, seniors turn out to vote in elections at a higher rate than any other age group. In the 2000 election, more than two-thirds of seniors voted, compared with only 54% of the total population. Moreover, seniors' voting participation rates have risen over the past 25 years--particularly among those over 75, says Gans--as rates for every other age group have declined. As a fraction of the total vote, the senior share of the pie has grown from 15.4% in 1968 to 20.3% in 1996.
 
These seniors are not only well-informed--studies show that they follow the news more closely and know more about the issues than younger folk do--but cluster in influential "swing states" such as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Florida. It's no wonder politicians stumble over one another to offer older folks generous health care and prescription-drug financing plans.
 
But such promises probably won't win over seniors, according to Binstock, because the elderly don't vote as a "bloc" with an eye toward any one issue. Politicians generally target voting blocs--women and African Americans, for example--with campaign rhetoric or specific promises because they identify them as responsive to such enticements. But although seniors might pay attention to politicians' positions on specific issues, such as Social Security or Medicare, such matters don't dictate their votes.
 
Instead, seniors "tend to distribute their votes in the same proportion as the electorate as a whole," says Binstock. National election polls over the last few decades show that, like the general population, seniors supported Reagan in 1980 and 1984, Bush in 1988, Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and Gore in 2000--and in roughly the same numbers. Over the same time period, African Americans voted overwhelmingly more often for Democratic candidates than the general population did, and women voted significantly more often for Democrats than did men. The notion that seniors vote for their favorite candidates like everyone else does makes sense to Binstock. As people age, he points out, "they don't lose their identities of social and economic class, religion, race, ethnicity, locale, [or] partisan attachments." As a consequence, Binstock suggests that "electioncampaigns would be well advised to target the seniors on the same issues that they target people in general"--which in this election means terrorism, the economy, and the war in Iraq.
 
Not all political scientists agree with Binstock's assessment of the "senior vote," however. Seniors might not be "single-issue voters," says political scientist Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, but they do tend to be "more sensitive" about stereotypical senior issues than younger voters are. Jacobs cites a number of polls showing that although seniors care about issues such as terrorism, in comparison with the general population a "significantly higher proportion" also rate Medicare and Social Security as particularly important.
 
And these leanings can make a measurable difference in an election, Jacobs maintains. "There was some research after the 2000 election which suggested that Al Gore's hard stand against the partial privatization of Social Security helped him with the senior vote in Florida," he says. Given the few votes that actually remain in play in our highly polarized electorate, politicians might consider even a slight chance of swaying a few senior votes worth the trouble.
 
When assessing how much stock seniors place in candidates' positions on issues such as Social Security, the data are open to interpretation. Take for example Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984. During his first term, Reagan had proposed cuts to Social Security--boldly gripping an issue often referred to as the "third rail" of American politics. Democratic candidate Walter Mondale repeatedly slammed Reagan on Social Security during the campaign, yet seniors overwhelmingly voted to reelect him.
 
For Binstock, this unflagging support confirms that the " 'touch Social Security and you're politically dead' [idea] was not borne out." But Jacobs argues that the reason that seniors continued to back Reagan was because he "completely flip-flopped" on his Social Security plan before the election, insisting that he would not cut benefits. Of course, maybe they just didn't like Mondale.
 
As these contrasting interpretations suggest, drawing definitive conclusions about why voters choose one candidate over another can be difficult. Still, both Binstock and Jacobs appear to agree that seniors aren't narrowly focused, single-issue voters. Politicians who doubt that notion should consider the words of James P. Gannon, a 65-year-old retired journalist who wrote earlier this month in USA Today that "in this election, I am more concerned about those soldiers in Iraq, kids in failing schools and the threat that terrorists are going to strike our cities. The world that my six kids and 10 grandkids are going to live in is far more important to me than the golden-age goodies promised by pandering politicians."
 
The so-called 800-pound gorilla, it seems, has far broader interests than politicians sometimes assume. If wisdom comes with age, perhaps so does a broad range of concerns. When they vote this 2 November, we can expect seniors to demonstrate both.
 
Chris Mooney (www.chriscmooney.com), 27, wants politicians to focus more on 20-something issues.