The NPR Politics Podcast - Older Voters Worried About Economy, Abortion

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

They vote in large numbers. They're a part of the electorate that usually gets courted heavily. But older voters say this time around, presidential campaigns are ignoring them. We explore what's on their minds in 2024. This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, national political correspondent Don Gonyea & senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hi, this is Ruthie. And Maui. And Boise. And we are in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois for the Youth Literature

Festival where we will meet a lot of amazing children's book creators like Justin Reynolds, L&L, and our mom Shannon Gibney. This podcast was recorded at 1 0 6 p.m eastern time on Wednesday, October 9th of 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show. I love that. Clearly, mom creating mentor authors. That's awesome. Fantastic. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Don Gagne, National Political Correspondent. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And before we dive into today's show, a quick reminder to hit the follow button on your podcast app to make sure you get notifications whenever we publish a new episode. All right. On to the news.

We have spent a lot of time talking about younger voters, this election cycle. So today on the show, we've got the flip side to that. Older voters, they are key to both Democrats and Republicans in their ambition to win the White House. And Don, I want to begin with you because you have been out on the campaign trail, speaking with seniors, interviewing them. What do folks want? The first thing you notice is older voters, senior voters are not a monolith, right? They cover the spectrum.

Okay, no surprise there. Another thing that is not particularly shocking is their issues are, at least their top issues, are overwhelmingly the same issues voters of all stripes talk about. And more than anything in these conversations, I hear about economic concerns, you know, inflation, the cost of food, etc., etc. For Republicans, immigration always comes up next on the list. And for Democrats, the one distinction is they put abortion up near the top. And if I can just give you a little sample, I was recently in Erie County, Pennsylvania,

you know, world-famous Erie County in this election, and I bumped into Rich Pisano, 82 years old, on a little sleepy little downtown street in the small town of Girard. I asked him what was important. Okay, you're paying $5 for a pound of ground meat. What was you paying for a pound of ground meat when Trump was president? More people were working. Our life was better under Trump than it has been under him and her.

So again, you hear him focusing on things like the price of ground meat, but we should also push back here. Unemployment is lower today than it was under Donald Trump's presidency. It was also interesting to hear him say there at the end, him and her, a clear linkage there between President Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who's now at the top of the ticket for Democrats. So, Domenico, before we get really deep into this conversation, I want you to help us understand why this group is important for both sides. We heard there from Rich Pisano, as Don outlined, it sounds like he's more supportive of Trump. But Democrats are certainly courting older voters as well. And why are they so

important to both political parties? Well, they vote at high rates. You know, the older you are, the better educated you are, the more likelihood there is that you're going to turn out to vote. So that's why in a lot of respects, this election has been different than past elections, because Democrats, whether it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, have been winning actually those voters who are 65 plus as one group to talk about seniors, which is really unusual for a Democrat. Traditionally, Republicans have won, you know, seniors 65 plus since 2000. Al Gore was the last Democrat to win that group. And why that's important is when you look at things like likely voter models and you think about high turnout or low turnout in an election, a lot of times people used to

say that a low turnout election hurts Democrats more because their groups that are important to their base vote at lower rates. Well, there are some voters who that certainly still applies to younger voters, younger African American voters in particular, Latinos, but older voters, because they vote at such high rates, it's actually helping Democrats in some of those likely voter models that we're seeing for this election. And if Harris is able to win them over this time, that would be a big switch. This is fascinating to me, Domenico, because I too have been intrigued in looking at some of those polls to understand what has happened in the last few election cycles to reach this point now

where Democrats appear to potentially win this very coveted demographic group that they haven't done very well with the last few cycles. What's shifted? Well, I think that when we hear from some older voters, it really has a lot to do with democracy and how the United States looks on the world stage. You know, I think that the way Donald Trump presents himself, you know, is so unusual for what past American presidents have been like the, you know, post World War Two dominance of the United States, you really had, you know, kind of similar foreign policies between Democrats and Republicans. And certainly, when it comes to sticking with US alliances, like those Western European countries, NATO allies and the like, that's been a huge difference

with Donald Trump versus now Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris and Democrats. And we've seen a switch not just with older voters over 65, but we have also seen a switch with college-educated white voters who have similar concerns. I am curious, though, Don, because we've heard so much about the gender divide, this election cycle, if you noticed a split between men and women amongst the older voters that you were talking to. And look, it's confirmed by a recent poll that the AARP has done. Now, they consider older voters voters over 50. So we're talking about a larger group than just seniors. But there has been a lot of movement among women in that group in their polling since Kamala Harris became the nominee. While overall the polling choice between Harris and Trump remains very close, if you just look at women in that age group, Harris's lead grows to 12 points. That's a huge shift from what we saw

five, six months ago. And another interesting thing when you break it down is the polling shows that women have kind of a different take on the economy than men do in this age group. Here's how Nancy Lamon, she's an executive at the AARP puts it. Older women are very focused on the here and now. Do I have enough money in my weekly budget for all the things that I need? At the same time, they are focused on the longer term, on their retirement security and social security. We've always seen both sets of economic concerns, but never have we seen kind of a future focus on retirement security and social

security quite so prevalent among older women. And one more thing she adds, she says a lot of women in this age group are caregivers, caregivers for their own elderly parents or other family members. And that also affects how they see the economy and the options that are available to them. Let me ask you about one other issue, Don, that you had mentioned at the outset, and that is reproductive rights abortion. We know that this has been key to how Democrats are messaging. What did you hear in your conversations on that? It is absolutely a part of this gender gap. You can't miss it. And what's interesting is, you know, I talk to voters of all ages, but these senior women, they talk about reproductive freedoms in a way that almost makes them sound indignant that

these things they fought for are now being taken away. Let's just meet one more voter. Her name is Diana Walls. She was at a Tim Walls event in Bethlehem, PA. She spells it differently, no relation, but listen to how she talks about this. I want my granddaughter to not have less rights than I had and that I fought for because I was politically active in the 70s when we couldn't get birth control legally, when we couldn't get abortions legally. I see us slippery sloping our way back into that misogynistic, oppressive culture. And that scares me. So you hear her say there, I fought for this. And she really does take it personal that these battles need to be fought again.

All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. This message comes from the podcast Pod Save America. It is here to help with all of the election analysis. Co-hosted by former Obama aides, the show is having honest conversations about the state of this race and they want you to join. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform now. And we're back. And this 2024 presidential election was originally between the two oldest major party candidates in American history. And Joe Biden's numbers among seniors, you know, they were really strong. Jiminy Quid, it sounded like you were saying that with Biden off the ticket, some of that support appears to be going to Harris and she's still doing quite well. With seniors, have you noticed any shifts?

Yeah, there hasn't really been a shift away from Biden, I should say, with voters 65 plus. They've basically stayed there with Kamala Harris for the most part. In our last poll in the NPR PBS News Marist poll, Harris had a 52 to 45 lead over Trump with voters 65 and older who are likely voters, who are the most likely to vote this fall. When it was just registered voters, it wasn't much different. It was 52-44. So there's been a pretty sturdy and stable advantage that both Harris and Biden have had throughout this election campaign. And if it were to be something like 52-45, that would be a complete flip from 2020. So something has clearly shifted post-pandemic as well as post-January 6th. And, Don, does that match with what you've been hearing out on the campaign trail? Are the folks that you're meeting who are backing Harris, were they previously backing Joe Biden? And the folks that are backing Trump now, were they backing him before? Yeah, I remember conversations with people in Pinellas County, Florida, St. Petersburg, and in Clearwater in that area. And again, you'd meet a Biden supporter. They might say to you,

yeah, he's old. Geez, he's even older than me. I'm sure glad I'm not working, but he's all right. Yeah, I support him. I think he's up to the job. And now that Harris is at the top of the ticket, again, I haven't gone back to these exact same voters, but the seniors now will say, oh, yeah, Biden was too old. We're glad to have some new blood in there. We like her. We're all in. I have yet to encounter anybody who's not supporting Harris, who supported Joe Biden. And the difference in their ages, if anything, is a plus for them now, no matter what they said before. So I want to ask you both about how Harris and Trump are trying to

court senior voters and some of the policies and the rhetoric that we're hearing from them. Yesterday on ABC's The View, Vice President Harris rolled out a plan to expand Medicare coverage to help cover the costs of home health care aides for seniors. And, you know, Donald Trump promised to halt taxes on Social Security benefits. It's clear to me that both of these candidates are trying to offer policies or promises to voters. Do you have any sense of whether or not these ideas are trying to offer policies or promises to voters. Do you have any sense of whether or not these ideas are actually resonating with voters? Do they matter in terms of how they're thinking about voting? Well, I think one of the things that certainly, you know,

has become an issue and is an issue in every election is protecting Social Security and Medicare. Both programs are very popular. And there have been some issues within the Republican side of things on the right, you know, saying that Medicare's welfare, for example, half of Republicans in a survey had seen this year said that, but they still thought that Medicare was popular. So I think that those two issues are ones that you hear both Harris and Trump try to sell to older voters to say that they're going to protect it. I do wonder, though, Domenico, how much Social Security is a concern for, say, like a 55-year-old. And Don mentioned he was talking to a lot of seniors. You mentioned polling of 65-plus people. Then there's the AARP poll, which referred to people over the age of 50. But I imagine the concerns of an 85-year-old who's retired on a fixed income is going to be different than a 55-year-old, say, who's still actively working and a part of the labor force. So is there a

political risk to talking about older voters as one monolithic group? Well, I mean, yeah, everybody has different priorities, right? And that's where obviously you don't want to get too generalized. But everybody's worried about prices and the economy as well. Healthcare costs are a huge piece of things. And that varies by the types of people you talk to, where they live, who they generally vote for. And women and men, there's a big divide on that as well. Women know, women's concerns, as Donna's talked about, for older women is different than men's concerns. And we've seen even through polling, regardless of age, women care more about health care as an issue, and men

care more about things like taxes. And that's been true for, you know, a couple decades. One other interesting thing I've been hearing out there, and the AARP polling actually backs this up, a lot of senior voters complain that the campaigns aren't paying enough attention to them. They do see TV ads, they do get mailings, but they feel like too much of the focus has been on younger voters and younger groups when they, as seniors, as older voters, are the ones who really turn out every time. Alrighty, let's leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Don Gagne, National Political Correspondent.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.