Trump Trails Among Seniors
Some states with big populations of people over 65 years old are also places where voters appear to be shifting away from Trump, polls show.
Please note Trump Trails Among Seniors, Key Group in Many Battleground States
Mr. Trump won seniors by 7 percentage points in 2016 but has trailed Mr. Biden by 10 points with that group all year in Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling. The coronavirus pandemic is making it hard for the president to rebound with older voters, who are among those most vulnerable to Covid-19.
Mr. Trump’s weakened standing with seniors is particularly important because of one demographic fact: Nearly every competitive state in the election is also home to large shares of people age 65 and older—larger than the national average.
Interviews and polling suggest that Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is weighing on the minds of older voters.
Asked whether the economy or coronavirus was more important to their vote for president, more seniors in the Journal/NBC News national survey picked coronavirus, the only age group to do so, though the preference among seniors was narrow. Seniors were also more likely than other age groups to say Mr. Trump was taking unnecessary risks with his own health when it comes to the virus.
Rallies Don’t Equate to Turnout
Trump can cheer all they want and show up en masse at rallies.
However, that does not win them votes among seniors or women.
Trump Supporters Entitled to their Own Opinions
Trump supporters are entitled to their own opinions, of course. But they act as if they are entitled to the opinions of others.
Rally turnouts don’t matter. Overall votes do.
In 2016 Trump turned the election into a referendum on Hillary. This year, Trump turned the election into a referendum on Trump, and he is losing that referendum.
Why Trump Will Lose the Election in One Word
On October 16, I wrote Why Trump Will Lose the Election in One Word
The word was “women”. It will be enough. But if you insist on another word, add “seniors”.
Mish
if seniors are worried about their health they should wear masks, avoid large crowds and wash their hands 100X a day , exactly what we, restrained and oppressed europeans have been doing…..and the results are…. FANTASTIC : we are now dramatically and exponentially WORSE off than in march……..Damn pity we don t have a scapegoat like Trump to blame it all on !! Fools enjoy being fooled that s the way it is and always will be ! Allow me to take the opportunity to congratulate you already with your great new president Biden …..rrrrm…. yeah right….I guess. This can only happen in the US of A….
“if seniors are worried about their health they should wear masks, avoid large crowds and wash their hands 100X a day”
Most of them are more careful anyway but nevertheless I disagree with you.
That’s like saying you shouldn’t walk down a particular street because there’s a lot of muggings. Or you shouldn’t go on the internet because you might get trolled. Or you shouldn’t cross a particular road because of speeding motorists.
Its better to fix problems rather than avoid them.
I think the question is – were people actually doing what you outlined? If you have a population divided in their beliefs about this pandemic – as we do in the US – I think you’ll fine the answer is ‘no’.
Crisis in America give each president an opportunity to shine and build a legacy. Not Trump. He acted inconvenienced when it was hit time to step up to the plate and lead.
Still waiting for the bombshell headline “Libertarians endorse Biden”……
“non-college-educated white men are fleeing the president’s camp at an alarming rate and admitting that they have become embarrassed by his actions and his bullying” – https://www.yahoo.com/news/ditching-donald-trump-largest-voter-100102798.html
With Covid spreading to rural areas in the south and midwest where Trump won well over 70% of the vote in 2016, they might have figured out Trump just can’t handle a fairly noncommunicable virus by ordering a national mask mandate. It turns out most rural hospitals have less ICU beds per capita than large metropolitan areas. They are so screwed. But they get what they deserve because they listened to Trump instead of real medical experts. I wonder if they will get regeneron. LOL.
My unofficial poll tells me there are far more voters who voted for Trump in 2016 with buyers remorse than new converts to Trumpism
White males with a college degree too. Poll after poll shows the more educated the less likely to support Trump
Above all, seniors want to keep the status quo system going, it largely benefits them. That is the reason they are leaving Trump, anecdotal: my particular neighborhood was filled with Trump signs in 2016, the neighborhood has a lot of seniors. Now I can only think of two homes with Trump signs, some have switched to Biden signs from 4 years ago. Trump is done
Everyday stock price movements are always ‘explained’ by some news event, but no evidence is ever given to prove that that was it.
I would have to see more evidence to accept that seniors are rejecting Trump specifically over his Covid policies and not a raft of other possible factors. Until then, I’ll regard it the same way as the explanations offered for market moves: Perhaps.
Makes sense, though, doesn’t it. If you put it out that it isn’t so serious because it “only” kills old people….likely to make the old people a bit unhappy. However, it could just as well be that Trump is talking about doing away with the payroll tax, and that is the main funding source for Social Security. There several reasons for seniors to cool on Trump.
Here is the real problem. Trump likes to divide, and then put himself in the bigger half. That works, initially, but after awhile the plan backfires. When you divide on one issue only, and are in the bigger half, you win, but the more issues you divide based on, the more people you exclude, particularly if the program is “agree on everything, or leave”.
Bit by bit, Trump has carved down his core from 50% to about 38% of the population. One of the groups he has carved out is Seniors concerned about Coronavirus.
One more thing that springs to mind….Seniors always vote primarily out of fear…of something…..and fear of death is very high on their list.
In this case the effect might be positive…..but it is often negative….because all you have to do with Seniors is tell them what to fear…..and who to blame….and you will get most of the senior vote if they believe you.
Turns out seniors like their early bird special and that living and breathing thing.
Full disclosure….I am a Senior-in-Training….counting down the days until I qualify for Social Security and Medicare…neither of which I’m likely to use for quite some time, however.
“Seniors always vote primarily out of fear.”
Bullshit.
I am 72 and I don’t vote out of fear.
I vote for a better life for my child and grandchildren.
Clean air, water, land.
Once again, my long well thought out reply has been removed. By somebody (or more likely some thing)
I have no problem with your motivation, Dave. I’m right there with you, in fact.
But MANY seniors ARE fear motivated…and the easiest way to use them….manipulate them….. is to suggest somebody is going to mess with their benefits.
Whatever is true about whether Trump mishandled Coronavirus, he gets to own the problem…because it happened while he was in office.
I don’t think there is any doubt he could have done a far better job….he is completely lacking in any understanding of science, medicine, or epidemiology…and he has…..and has had…..a bad case of Dunning-Kruger effect…and the Peter principle….. he won’t listen to people who are smarter and better educated than he is….and he has been promoted to a position far above his qualifications.
And people can see……that it was always about him and his winning the election…..nobody would accuse Trump of deep concern about other people.
But it was unlikely that we would not have had a huge problem……even if he had done more things right….and the few things he did get right…like limiting entry from China when he finally did…still didn’t matter that much.
But what he could have done…..is he could have pulled the country together to fight COVID with coherent national strategies…..and he did just the opposite….just to punish NY and CA and his political opponents. Even a dumb senior can see that.
A change of the guard is unlikely to make much difference now….that barn door was locked way too late.
What we should get out of living through this pandemic that NOBODY gets…and nobody writes about…..is how we could prevent a worse one….by outlawing genetic modification of viruses….
Maybe if the next one kills half the planet, people will wise up.
Nah…..not here.
Fauci’s NIH was funding the GOF research at the Wuhan P4 lab. It was basically a form of outsourcing since the research was banned in the US in 2014. A coherent national strategy is much harder in the States than in many other countries because it is a federation, unlike most (heavily centralized) European states.
As for who to listen to, that’s always a choice. If you want to run economic policy, you can always find famous economists in different corners of the debate. If there’s a war there are always generals you can put on TV to support it or to oppose it. Epidemiologists do not agree either, is one of the most important lessons of this pandemic. The appeal to expertise and authority is much more problematic than people make it out to be.
Science was once our bastion of truth. Everything about our physical reality we really have figured out in the last 500 years comes from careful use of the scientific method of inquiry.
Now science is being perverted by the same forces at work elsewhere……its more about huge grants and research funding….good science can now be stolen or suppressed…..”peer reviewed” literature is not to be fully trusted.
Universities are not bastions of the scientific method…..they are self-perpetuating bureaucratic institutions with heavy political motivations. STEM is actually being attacked…..and the leadership is folding under pressure.
People who grow viruses have huge financial incentives to take chances. Fame and profit trump caution and good sense.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I know that COVID never was a decent candidate to make a biological weapon…and there was no way it was released on purpose.
On the other hand it shows us how easy it is to kill lots of people without really meaning to……humans always make human errors….
And fwiw it actually is dead easy now to create biological weapons….and every country that has the means is ignoring the rules and pursuing it. Biological weapons do exist in numbers large enough to make COVID look tame…..and we ought to be talking about it more.
Science is not univocal. Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics. Before him there was controversy of the ether wind. There are sill many controversies in physics. And physics is the most cut and dried discipline there is.
Epidemiology is fraught by unkowns and things that are hard to measure and prove.
It’s not just the corruption of science or anti-science: Data only become facts within a frame of reference, and facts only ‘say’ something within a theory that purports to explain things or tie them together. People can disagree on what is interesting or uninteresting data, they can dispute the relevance of facts or what these are actually evidence of, and they can certainly disagree on theories. The appeal to science is usually just an appeal to authority, a dodge to face up to the responsibilities of choice, saying: There is no alternative.
I believe you have misinterpreted what controversy means in science. Quantum mechanics works in the sense that it explains a vast array of phenomena, and has enabled creation of devices (post-Einstein: such as in computers, lasers, cell phones etc.). Einstein never objected to that aspect of Quantum Mechanics. His objection was to the interpretation of quantum mechanics which he argued makes it incomplete. If you come up with a more complete theory scientists will eagerly embrace it. The celebrated Higgs boson discovery uses a five-sigma criterion https://understandinguncertainty.org/explaining-5-sigma-higgs-how-well-did-they-do : there is 1 in 3.5 million chance that their experimental results are a statistical fluke. This is considered a very, very strict criterion. You can misuse this information to mean that Higgs boson is fake. Some fields like cosmology are based on observations not so much on experiments. Some fields like climate change on observations and simulations; there you can assign reasonable probabilities of a deduction being correct and base public policies on them. This is on a far more solid footing than the public policy decisions made in economics like those made by Federal Reserve or the repugnant TARP in 2008.
I fault Trump, if this is true, that the WH early on axed a plan via the USPS to send out masks with information. Didn’t want to “alarm” the country. Hell if the region/local where your at is very high with flu cases i.e. hospital admissions than you should be wearing a mask around gatherings of people. It took covid19 to remind people of that protection.
By doing nothing positive with the coronavirus, tRump has been endangering seniors and core interests of women. We cannot get rid of TrumPlague quick enough.
Old people should not be afraid of cornavirus. If they catch it and die, that’s how the cookie crumbles.