Kamala Harris may be the first Democratic presidential nominee to win seniors since Al Gore
Kamala Harris may be the first Democratic presidential nominee to win seniors since Al Gore
We’ve heard a lot about the groups of voters that Kamala Harris seems to be struggling with – or at least not doing as well as Joe Biden did with them four years ago. Yet, the vice president has a small national edge over Donald Trump. How is that possible?
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Everyone loves to bag on boomers, but they’re actually more left leaning than they’re given credit for (more so now after Covid killed a lot of antivax seniors). Gen X is the MAGA stronghold.
I don't think that's the problem. Here's an example of the distribution of voting, and it's sort of what you'd expect from the stereotype. Note that Gen-X is close to 50%, a bit more to the right. What affects things more (and mentioned in the article) is actual voting, or rather the lack of voting from the apathetic or oppressed or mislead. If more younger voters don't vote, the results skew to the right.
Add to that how different the commitment to party is between left and right. Left has lots of differing opinions and the infighting between Democrat and farther left 3rd party voters often result in either spoiler or no votes at all (which is why ranked voting would be a huge change). Right on the other hand, we've all heard the line about party first, no matter what. Liars, rapists, felons, still voting for the candidate because that's what a Republican does.
I don't know if the latter can be easily fixed outside of better education both in voting information and in general. The right really aren't in favor of any of that though, that would hurt their numbers. Trump even said it out loud, they love the poorly educated.
The first part though is powerful. I've heard it said to young crowds many times that if more of them show up they can hugely affect the results.
I'm not denying my generation (Gen-X, and why I felt I needed to reply) has its share of MAGAs. Long ago when I first joined Facebook and started adding friends I found from high school I thought it would be cool to reconnect. It was disappointing how quickly I found so many of them were not the same left-leaning radical free thinking people I thought I knew back then. But MAGA mania isn't solely in one generation, it's a problem shared that will stay around if we don't change some things.
I guess that probably depends whether you're counting by raw numbers or by proportion of each age group. I just looked this up and Pew Research Group has this chart from April 2024 (attached). Proportionately, it shows a fairly consistent shift toward more support for Republicans as the age brackets go up, with the one exception being from 60-69 and 70-79 where support drops 2%. Either way, Baby Boomers are proportionately more supportive of the Republican Party than Gen Xers are.
Moving on from proportion to raw numbers, that's definitely tougher to tell. The Wikipedia articles for each generation cite the latest census data, but that was in 2019, so obviously figures will have changed since then. Still, the census said there were 65.2 million Gen Xers living in the United States, vs. 71.6 million Baby Boomers. Have six million Boomers died in the last five years? Probably not, but obviously the ratios will have gotten somewhat tighter since then.
Ultimately, on raw numbers, I'd say Baby Boomers (currently aged ~60-78) currently outnumber Gen Xers (currently aged ~44-59) and are proportionately more likely to support Republicans, per the Pew chart.
EDIT: I got ninja'd, but I brought a chart.
Definitely! People forget what was going on during Boomer growth years.