Suppose you We were going to your high school prom in the spring of 1969, and you turned on the radio (maybe AM) in your Mustang on the way to the school cafeteria – the #1 song in America? Aquarius/Let the Sun ShineFifty-five years later, you are now 73, the average age of a baby boomer. That means that when you start voting next month, you will play a disproportionate role in the outcome of the next election. That’s because candidates must work hard to attract younger voters to the polls, but not older people, who are largely ingrained in democracy. There is no known way to stop older people from voting.
Donald Trump might be tempted to think this is good news for him—as the oldest man ever to win a presidential nomination and whose campaign is rooted in nostalgic appeals to past greatness, he should be winning most of those votes from baby boomers and the silent generation. After all, he won those categories in 2020, albeit by a narrower margin than in 2016. But not so fast this time—remember that song from the movie “Invincible Man.” hair On the radio. We’re getting older voters all the time—about 10,000 people are turning 65 every day. And they’re increasingly making that caricature—older voters being more conservative—irrelevant. Older voters come from the past—but the past they come from is changing. Which means that new polls suggest that something like a silver wave may be building as November approaches.
Consider, for example, last week’s Fairleigh Dickinson poll, which showed Kamala Harris with a seven-point lead nationally, largely driven by her 16-point lead among people over 65. On Thursday, a Suffolk University poll showed Harris with a seven-point lead nationally. USA Today In a New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris led Trump 53-42 among voters over 60—her largest share of the vote among any demographic. The same is true in several swing states: A New York Times/Siena College poll found her with a modest lead among older voters in Arizona—and Arizona has a lot of older voters. In North Carolina, another swing state packed with retirees, she had a 10-point lead among older voters. In Maine, the statistically oldest state in the union, Harris had a 20-point lead among older voters. In Vermont, the second-oldest state, 61% of older voters thought Trump’s mental and physical health was “very poor,” higher than any other group. (Which is worth thinking about—if anyone is an expert at measuring decline, it’s those of us who see it around us on a regular basis, and perhaps feel it in ourselves.)
There are enough polls where you can find the opposite as well – another Washington Post In a poll about two weeks ago, Trump was showing a two-point lead over Harris among older voters, and a Bell Center poll showed him up by three points. But I think it’s safe to say that Trump shouldn’t be counting on older voters. At Third Act, which I founded to organize progressive voters over 60, our volunteers have written hundreds of thousands of postcards to swing states, and they’re calling every night; they’re informally reporting a huge surge in interest and support for the Harris-Walls ticket. We organized a “Seniors for Kamala” call last month, and it went viral—with Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, and Robin Wall Kimmerer all making the case that older Americans are thinking about getting ahead.
Some of this can be explained by simple self-interest. We older voters know that Trump last time around made repeated efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security, and we paid attention earlier this year when he was asked about entitlement programs, and he said, “There’s only so much you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cuts.”
But I think deeper cultural forces are at play, too—muscle memory, generational DNA, formed in that remarkable period of social, cultural, and political transformation that was the 1960s. It was the height of the civil rights campaign, the rise of the women’s movement, and the first Earth Day. As the political scientist Nate Cohn pointed out earlier this year, we are not Archie Bunker—that’s our parents. We are stupid. We lived under people’s freedoms. Roe v. Wade And the protections that the Clean Air Act provides, and it was disappointing to see the Supreme Court strip them away from us.
As much as we consider ourselves “conservative,” clean air and reproductive rights are among the things we want to preserve. Older voters are second only to the youngest in their share of “climate voters,” in part because we’ve lived long enough to see how radically the climate has changed. Eighty-six percent of older Americans think abortion should be legal at least under certain circumstances—in part because we’re old enough to remember coat hangers. As for democracy—well, maybe January 6 hit us especially hard, because we’ve had fifteen or twenty elections, and we’ve come to take the peaceful transfer of power for granted.
But it’s not just the issues. To us, Trump seems unnatural. Even those of us who support him at our age tend to say things like, “I like his policies but I wish he would shut up.” That’s because our politics may have been shaped by the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, and our attitudes may go back even deeper. Remember, we were born in the Truman and Eisenhower eras.
Consider, for example, Trump’s endless insistence that everything is rigged against him. (He once claimed that he would win the Nobel Peace Prize “for a lot of things, if they distributed it fairly, which they don’t.”) We may think our parents were too strict, and we may be happy that our children are more aware of their feelings, but we look askance at adults who see themselves as victims (perhaps especially if they are also billionaires, thanks to their parents).
Or consider Trump’s disrespect for veterans. Yes, we were an anti-war generation, but our parents fought in World War II and Korea, and even if we ended up with divergent views on war and foreign policy, we still found it annoying to hear that Trump refused to visit a military cemetery because of the rain, or that he didn’t want wounded veterans near him at parades because they made him look bad. We all knew people who had fought in Vietnam, the last conflict fought by conscripts. Someone like Tim Walz—a football coach and National Guardsman—is a familiar figure to us, even though he’s barely 60.
I’m not saying that older Americans will definitely vote for Harris and Walz. Trump clearly expects that we won’t—and the idea of a black woman in the White House would be deeply unsettling. The truth is that Democrats aren’t doing much to reach older voters—when the Biden campaign was still running, they launched their outreach to seniors with “events like bingo and pickleball,” which may not be enough to read the room correctly. (Think more like Carole King, who played in the “Swifties for Kamala” appeal.) But there are signs—even in outposts like the Villages, Florida, where golf-cart convoys of Harris and Trump now roll through sleepy streets. Don’t ignore the seniors. It seems that many of us might support the Democrats—and if so, this silver wave may turn blue.
Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate change and democracy. He is also a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College.
