Only a mentally damaged grifter like Donald Trump could possibly manage to alienate the senior citizen electorate, which has voted Republican in 9 of the last 12 presidential elections and backed him in ’16.
I’ll cop to all the usual caveats about the polls. Yeah, it’s only April, and yeah, his fortunes could change for the better. But the pandemic body count is only going to mount (we’ll soon surpass the entire Vietnam death toll), this guy is getting more nuts every day, and his obsession with prematurely “reopening” the economy in time to save his re-election will continue to imperil those Americans, aged 65 and up, who are most mortally vulnerable to the coronavirus.
But before we parse the latest polls – the consensus is that Trump is hemorrhaging seniors at a fast clip – permit me to go out on a limb and suggest that what he blathered during last night’s improv show will not help him recoup lost seniors. Older folks tend to be vigilant about the medicines they put into their tender bodies, so I doubt that Trump’s latest virus-fighting tip will inspire confidence: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that? By injection inside or almost a cleaning. As you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
Just for the record: If Joe Biden were ever to suggest that Americans should put bleach into their lungs, he would be rightly dissed as a senile idiot and his candidacy would be instantly dead. By what logic should a serial practitioner of lies and quackery get a pass?
And speaking of Biden: All we hear about is that he’s (supposedly) weak with young voters under 30. But the real story right now, with potentially huge implications for November, is that Biden is rapidly gaining strength with voters 65 and older – the same crucial slice of the electorate that favored John McCain and Mitt Romney over Obama in ’08 and ’12; the same slice that favored Trump over Hillary by seven points (52-45) in ’16; the same slice that (unlike the young) turns out en masse in every election.
Until the pandemic hit us, Trump was generally doing OK with seniors. But for some reason – take a wild guess! – seniors are clearly not happy with the way he has handled the crisis. In early March, according to the Quinnipiac poll, seniors gave Trump a tepid favorable rating (48-45) on the crisis, but they gave Biden a three-point edge (49-46) anyway. One month later, the favorable rating is gone (it’s thumbs down, 45-52), and Biden’s lead in the matchup has swelled to 13 points (54-41).
That roughly jibes with two other new polls. The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll (which is conducted by a Republican pollster working with a Democratic pollster), has Biden ahead among seniors by 9 points. A CNN poll has Biden up among seniors by 13 – mirroring the latest Quinnipiac stats. Quinnipiac also took the pulse of swing-state Florida, which tilted to Trump in ’16 thanks to seniors. Its latest tally of Florida seniors: Biden over Trump by 10 points.
There’s much more. The latest Morning Consult poll reports that senior support for Trump’s handling of the crisis has dropped 20 points since mid-March, and it’s now lower than any age group except the young. The top reason for their disenchantment? Trump’s determination to speedily reopen the economy and thus raise the odds that older folks will be killed off. According to Morning Consult, seniors say that defeating the virus should take priority over healing the economy – by a roughly 6 to 1 ratio.
That’s in sync with the latest CBS News poll, which reports that a plurality of seniors (43 percent) rate Trump’s handling of the virus as “very bad.” That’s the highest of any age bracket. Separately, 87 percent of seniors say the stay-at-home orders are working (again, the highest of any age bracket), and 71 percent (again, the highest) say they’re not comfortable with lifting those restrictions and risking more exposure.
Four years ago, 71 percent of seniors turned out to vote in the presidential election, and this year they’re strong enough in numbers to swing not just Florida, but Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Arizona. So it’s risky business for Trump to leave the impression that the health of seniors is merely a secondary concern. And even though he tweeted Wednesday that “Special care is, and always will be, given to our beloved seniors,” he still wants “our beloved seniors” to show up in person, and risk exposure, on November election day. He strongly opposes the expanded use of mail-in ballots – which seniors (and most Americans) view as a safety issue.
Well, you know the old saying: You reap what you sow. Four years ago seniors voted decisively for a “disrupter,” and they got one. He’s so disruptive that he fires and marginalizes scientists and medical experts, and seems inattentive to the risks of killing off his own voters.
It’s likely that the competition for seniors will tighten between now and November, but Biden doesn’t need to win the age bracket to win the race; shaving a few points from Trump’s ’16 margin would probably suffice. And rest assured that if Biden becomes president, the makers of Lysol won’t need to urge Americans not to drink their products.