Swinging Seniors

By Michael Bocian

Amid all the discussion of the shrinking gender gap, the growing marriage gap, and the swinging Hispanic vote, the important story of the senior vote in the 2004 presidential election has been largely overlooked. George W. Bush won among voters ages sixty and over, by 54 percent to 46 percent, a dramatic improvement from 2000 when Al Gore carried seniors 51 percent to 47 percent. In Ohio, Bush received 57 percent of senior votes in 2004, ten points more than he won in 2000.

Bush's remarkable turnaround among seniors says as much about which issues were absent from the campaign as it does about which issues were part of it. President Bush now claims that he campaigned on Social Security privatization, but Social Security hadn't been this absent from a presidential campaign in decades. In fact, Bush's "Ownership Society" television ad never even mentioned the words "Social Security."

And while Republican strategists in 2002 hoped that the Medicare reform law would deliver Bush the senior vote, the truth is that he won among seniors in spite of this law, which is unpopular among seniors. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in December showed that only 25 percent of seniors had a favorable impression of the law, while 42 percent had an unfavorable view.

In the absence of a real debate about Social Security, Medicare, or prescription drugs, seniors, like other Americans, experienced a campaign centered on security, war, resoluteness, and, particularly important among this group, cultural values.

A review of seniors' historical voting patterns is telling. Seniors voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election from 1972 through 1984 (Nixon, Ford, and Reagan twice). In fact, the Republican candidate did as well or better among seniors than any other age group in three of these four elections.

But in 1988, Michael Dukakis lost seniors by just one point, 50 percent to 49 percent, his best performance among any age group. And after the Reagan-Bush administration signed into law a tax on Social Security benefits, an increase in the Social Security retirement age, and the wildly unpopular Catastrophic Medicare Act, seniors moved away from George H. W. Bush.

In 1992, Bill Clinton expanded on what Dukakis had started, winning seniors 50 percent to 38 percent. In 1996, Clinton also won among seniors, but by a much smaller 48 percent to 44 percent margin against Bob Dole. Seniors were torn between disgust for the Republicans' $270 million in Medicare cuts and questions about Clinton's character arising from the Paula Jones lawsuit, the Whitewater scandal, and other emerging ethical issues.

Al Gore maintained Clinton's four-point advantage among seniors in the 2000 campaign, in which prescription drug benefits and Social Security (the "lockbox") weighed heavily. In fact, in a postelection survey conducted for Democracy Corps, the number one reason voters gave to support Al Gore, cited by 33 percent, was that he would protect Social Security and add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

In 2004, by contrast, neither campaign highlighted Social Security, Medicare, or prescription drugs. In Democracy Corps's postelection survey, only 16 percent of voters named Social Security and prescription drugs as one of the best reasons to support John Kerry.