We're still a gerontocracy
The over-65s went this year with the loser, but preliminary data suggest their slice of the American electorate got even bigger in 2020.
Americans just elected their oldest-ever president, but most of the 65-and-over voters who basically run this country (see my 2019 Politico piece, “America, the Gerontocracy”) voted for the other guy. It’s not like either candidate was exactly young. And yes, Trump’s mishandling of a pandemic that’s been especially deadly for the elderly did shave down his margin of victory among elderly voters.
But if the geezers stuck with Trump this year, it’s hard to imagine a majority of them will ever support a Democrat for president. Not in my lifetime, anyway. (I’m 62.) One reason Biden’s overall margin of victory was narrower than many people expected was that elderly voters in 2020 enlarged their slice of the voting pool more than any other age group, according to the Edison Research exit polls. They rose from 20 percent of all votes cast to 22 percent, which translates into an increase in political clout of 10 percent. The young (18-29), despite a stunning increase in turnout, did not enlarge their slice of the voting pool at all. Ignore this demographic reality—a growing cohort of crabby aging Baby Boomers who love to vote—at your peril.
I wrote about all this today (“America Is Run By Geezers”) in the New Republic.
You’ll note that I lay in caveats higher up than one typically sees in articles of this type. Polling has entered a period of hard times, and Edison Research’s exit polls in particular have long been weak in measuring participation rates among age groups. My friends Phil Keisling, board chair of the National Vote At Home Institute, and Michael Podhorzer, assistant to the president for strategic research at the AFL-CIO, fear that my addiction to shaky data risks condemning my soul to eternal damnation. We’ll have much better data next year, based on the actual voter rolls. I answer that on the great gettin’ up morning I will remind my Creator that the Edison Research exit polls were the only longitudinal data available as of November 2020, and that I alerted my readers that all my conclusions were provisional.
But just in case that disclaimer doesn’t wash my sins clean, here are some further musings set down by Brother Podhorzer:
Along with gender, age is the only thing we can know with a great deal of certainty because it’s on the voter file. That means that once the voter files are updated, we can know how many people voted who were 18-29 because they had to provide their date of birth when they registered to vote in nearly every state. So the only “methodology” you need to know how many people 18-29 voted is counting. No modeling, no assumptions of any kind, just counting.
Counting is good! When it’s available, then upon this rock shall I build my church. Here’s a chart Brother Podhorzer assembled to demonstrate just how much better simple arithmetic can be:
The black line is reality, as demonstrated by voter rolls, through 2018, which is all we have just now. The blue line is Edison Research exit poll findings, and the red line is the Census’s calculation, which is not yet available for 2020. The voter rolls and the Census figures are pretty close, but the voter rolls and the Edison Research exit polls are very different, and for voters 65 and older they’re barely on speaking terms.
Still. The blue line and the black line are converging, which suggests Edison Research’s reliability on the age demographic is improving. No matter whose data you use, the elderly have a larger turnout rate than young people. Whether the voter rolls for 2020 will show a 10 percent increase in elderly presence within the voting pool remains to be seen. But the voter rolls for previous elections show that elderly turnout (and also, not pictured here, the elderly’s share of the voting pool) has consistently been higher than the Edison Research exit polls documented. We really do live in a gerontocracy. Honest Injun.