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The organizing I’ve been a part of has shown not only are seniors engaged, but they are ready to take on fights progressives care about, like protecting public healthcare and fighting back against privatization.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election, but when all the votes are tallied, she may have won the senior vote. If so, she would be the first Democrat to do so since Al Gore did in 2000.
As of September 29, CNN reported that the average poll had Kamala Harris up with seniors by three points. Harris’ strong ratings continued to hold in a poll of likely voters by ABC/Ipsos, released a week later, showed Harris up 51-46%. CNN Exit polling has the two candidates tied with voters over 65, a group Trump won by 7%, and 5%, in 2016 and 2020 respectively.
Senior citizens took a beating over the last year, as the primary conversation about older people was centered on the two older men running for president, especially President Joe Biden. I get it, and was glad Biden stepped aside, but by the time he did there’d been plenty of collateral damage. Mainstream news media and popular culture took potshot after potshot at Biden, and sometimes Trump, with jokes about dementia. One Stephen Colbert bit featured Trump being inaugurated with a stack of Depends instead of a book of scripture.
One group that I think few would think we should more aggressively court, fold in, and organize with are seniors, but that is a self-defeating path if we want to realize significant change down the road.
I learned of Biden stepping down while among a hundred people, almost all seniors, filing into a meeting of a County Board of Supervisors in rural Wisconsin. They were there to protest a plan to privatize their beloved county-owned nursing home that in one form or another had been part of the county for more than a century. So many people showed up that the county had to create an overflow room to accommodate everyone. Then, one by one, older Democrats, Independents, and Republicans took to the podium and expressed their ire at the idea of selling off a venerable community institution that they had all paid into for years or a lifetime. It was a fight for publicly funded and run healthcare, and against privatization, and had cross-partisan appeal.
They were not alone in this fight, as small-town seniors in a handful of counties were doing the same, flooding into county board meetings, marching (or driving their tractors) in local parades, and giving pro-privatization county board members hell every step of the way.
In these meetings and marches, I experienced people, 75, 80, and older, having a third, even fourth, act, building relationships across partisanship, doing things for the first time, and some fighting for what was right with their very last breath. None of these fights to protect public healthcare would be possible if not for the leadership of people over 65. They have time, wisdom, and experience to contribute, and we need every bit of it.
In community organizing circles, there is a dearth of organizing of older working class people. The push has been to get younger. I get it, and over the years have trained hundreds of young organizers to organize younger people. But I would encourage us to think about the role of older people in building movements and a “larger we" that can get us to the other side of this tumultuous period in American history.
For those of us who crave significant change, whether as sweeping as doing away with the Electoral College, or an expansion of Medicare, or a reinstatement of some basic voting rights, It will require more than razor thin majorities coming to an agreement. It will require super majorities of people being in agreement on many things and across many states. If we want big change, we need a lot more people.
In many states older people are the fastest growing age demographic, becoming a higher percentage of the electorate, and will have a lot to say about who wins elections. Between 2010 and 2022, the 65-and-over population grew by 48%.
As swing states have been a hot topic of conversation, here’s how the aging of America is playing out in a few of those. The number of Wisconsinites aged 75 and older is projected to grow by 75% over the next two decades. Michiganders over 85 are the state’s fastest growing age group, and Pennsylvania’s over 65 population is already at more than 2.2 million. That’s a lot of people.
Seniors consistently turn out at the highest rate of any age group. According to the U.S. Census, voter registration numbers for those over 65 to 74 hover at 78%, higher than any other age group.
The organizing I’ve been a part of in Wisconsin has shown not only are seniors engaged, but they are ready to take on fights progressives care about, like protecting public healthcare and fighting back against privatization.
Seniors have united across partisanship to save their public nursing homes. In the spring elections, they took that energy to the ballot box and a number of county board members who led the charge to privatize, including the chairs of two counties, were voted out and replaced by candidates who supported keeping their nursing homes publicly owned. People in the community expanded who was in the fight, and they won.
There’s been a tendency among some progressives to look to narrow who is in, to slice us into smaller groups, and to not work in coalition with people unless we agree on all the things. One group that I think few would think we should more aggressively court, fold in, and organize with are seniors, but that is a self-defeating path if we want to realize significant change down the road.
If we want big things, we need more people. Let’s look to expand, not narrow, who is in, and, considering the fact that older people are becoming a larger percentage of the population, it would seem a major mistake to not place more focus here.
For seniors needing quality care in their final years and the families who love them, this is good policy by Kamala Harris—and good politics too.
Tight elections often come down to who has the strongest close. Kamala Harris has certainly had a strong one. One of the strongest elements has been her support for Medicare at Home, which would expand Medicare to include in-home care. There is plenty of evidence that this issue moves voters, and for swing voters looking for one more data point in that decision, this could be the tipping point.
Harris spoke about Medicare at Home when appearing on the Howard Stern Show earlier this month. This part of the conversation with Stern scored in the 95th percentile in determining a voter's opinion of Harris as a candidate, far outpacing all other messages.
This aligns with what we’ve found in Wisconsin. Senior Voters for Care, of which I am affiliated, teamed up with Hart Research Associates to conduct a poll of 800 likely voters over 55 in Wisconsin on views on long-term care.
The poll found that 71% of swing voters and 64% of independent voters said that if a candidate had a plan to provide more funding for long-term care, they would view that candidate more favorably. Kamala Harris has that plan.
The issue of long-term care has been a hot one in the state as a number of conservative county boards have pushed to privatize county-owned nursing homes despite their being five-star facilities and, in most cases, on solid financial footing. The issue has stirred up a hornet’s nest with seniors across partisanship, flooding into county board meetings, marching (and driving their tractors) in local parades, and organizing to stop the sale every step of the way.
The number of Wisconsinites 75 and older is projected to grow by 75% over the next two decades. If the state’s senior population continues to grow as projected, it will need 10,000 more registered nurses, CNAs, and home health care aids by 2030.
The most popular solution among those polled to the state’s looming care crisis was raising caregivers' wages to help attract and retain workers. Ninety-three percent of the people polled supported this measure, including 87 percent of Republicans and 93 percent of independents.
Nearly as popular was expanding Medicaid to increase access to necessary long-term care, with 87% overall backing this initiative, including 93% of Independents.
This is a big deal because Medicare at Home is essentially these two solutions put together, though even better, in that it would expand one of the most popular social programs in the country–Medicare. Chances are that support for this proposal would have outpaced the question we asked because, through Medicare, this long-term care benefit would be available to all of us, while Medicaid is only for those of us with low incomes and very little wealth. Because Medicare does not cover long-term, many families spend down their savings to qualify for Medicaid.
My family is spending my mom’s life savings and the money made from selling her house to pay for her assisted living care at $6,000 a month. It’s a common experience for many voters.
The poll found that 71% of swing voters and 64% of independent voters said that if a candidate had a plan to provide more funding for long-term care, they would view that candidate more favorably. Kamala Harris has that plan.
The Vice President’s plan to win the Presidency banks on some rapidly aging states. Wisconsin's 85-and-over population is expected to double between now and 2040. Michiganders over 85 are the state’s fastest-growing age group, and Pennsylvania’s over-65 population is already more than 2.2 million.
Medicare at Home is the right policy at the right time and appears to be good politics. If enough people heard about it in the campaign's closing weeks, it could be one of the parts of her strong finish that helps put her over the top.
This election will determine whether current and future seniors—and their families—can count on the government to keep the promises of Social Security and Medicare and to improve eldercare.
For seniors and their families, the choice in this election couldn’t be clearer. Before Donald Trump took office, our organization did not endorse candidates for president of the United States. But Trump was such a four-alarm fire for us and our members (older Americans across the country), that we felt a duty to endorse Joe Biden in 2020, breaking with nearly 40 years of precedent. This cycle, we have endorsed Kamala Harris as the candidate who will genuinely protect seniors’ interests, including the two programs in our organization’s name, Social Security and Medicare. We have also endorsed scores of candidates for House and Senate as “champions” for older Americans.
From a policy standpoint, this is a no-brainer. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden, has pledged to protect Social Security and Medicare from Republican proposals to cut both programs—by raising the retirement age, means testing, and reducing COLAs. But she also has endorsed the idea that the wealthy should begin contributing their fair share in payroll taxes, which would go a long way toward safeguarding the financial health of both Social Security and Medicare. With additional revenue flowing in—plus billions of dollars in savings on prescription drugs from the Inflation Reduction Act—we could not only strengthen, but expand, seniors’ earned benefits.
In October, the vice president laid out a plan to expand Medicare to cover long-term, in-home care for seniors (and people with disabilities). That is a historic proposal. Under the current system, seniors must impoverish themselves in order to qualify for long-term care under Medicaid—and may well end up in nursing homes. Otherwise, the main alternative is for families to provide home care, often at a high financial and personal cost.
Kamala Harris also wants to expand traditional Medicare to include hearing and vision coverage. We have been fighting for the enhancement of benefits for decades, because seniors’ health and safety depends on proper hearing and vision care. These coverages were part of President Biden’s original Build Back Better plan, a noble effort that can be revived with a new Democratic president and Congress.
On the other hand, it’s almost laughable that anyone would think Donald Trump is the better choice for seniors and their families. Trump is unserious about policy, except insofar as it helps him score political points. He knows that Social Security and Medicare are tremendously popular, so he claims he will protect them, while embracing proposals that could devastate both programs.
Many of Trump’s public statements over the years do not inspire confidence. He once called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” comparing America’s most successful social insurance program with a petty criminal enterprise. This year, he said he’d be “open” to cutting “entitlements,” a comment his campaign tried to walk back in the face of understandable backlash.
Each year that Donald Trump was president, he submitted White House budgets that would have cut Social Security and Medicare by billions of dollars. He recklessly suspended the FICA payroll tax during the pandemic and said that he hoped it would be “eliminated” entirely, never mind that this is Social Security’s main funding source. Now, he proposes to repeal taxes on Social Security benefits that were put in place during the 1983 reforms (signed into law by President Reagan) to help fund the program.
The Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, hardly a liberal group, estimates that Trump’s plans would cost Social Security up to $2.75 trillion over ten years—and would accelerate the projected depletion of the program’s trust fund reserves by three years. That’s just six years from now!
In the end, though, this election comes down to values. Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz came from the middle class and understand the struggles of working Americans. Harris was raised by a single mother in a modest Oakland neighborhood and cared for her aging mom when she was dying of cancer. Tim Walz lost his father at age 19, and credits Social Security survivor benefits with keeping his family from falling into poverty. These candidates’ lived experiences inform their policies affecting seniors and families.
The Harris/Walz ticket reflects the preferences of most Americans across when it comes to seniors’ earned benefits. Public opinion surveys consistently show that bipartisan majorities of Americans oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and agree that the wealthy should begin contributing their fair share. On the other side, the now-infamous blueprint for a second Trump term, Project 2025, calls for radical changes to Medicare that would end the program as we know it. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025, has advocated raising the Social Security eligibility age and other cuts to the program.
Donald Trump has (unconvincingly) attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but he is a member of an elite financial class that focuses on lining the pockets of the already wealthy and powerful. It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that the GOP has recruited millionaire candidates for Senate in key battleground states who, unlike their Democratic rivals, do not represent the interests of working people. Many of these candidates have supported raising the retirement age and privatizing Social Security, while championing more tax cuts for the rich. Their hostility to the interests of seniors is apparent. The GOP Senate contender in Wisconsin even suggested that nursing home residents aren’t truly capable of voting.
This election will determine whether current and future seniors—and their families—can count on the government to keep the promises of Social Security and Medicare and to improve eldercare. Growing old in America is increasingly costly. Without these bedrock programs, not only seniors, but their family members in the “sandwich generation” will find it even harder to navigate the cycles of life. In this clarifying light, the choices for President and Congress shouldn’t even be close.