Old voters swing based on the election year – 2024 proves

Over hot coffee at a Long Island diner, Frank Piccola and his friends do not shy away from offering their hot takes on the day’s politics — including the 2024 presidential contest. Piccola, an ardent backer of Donald Trump, is a father of eight, grandfather of 14, and great-grandfather of six. “I feel sorry for them if [Joe] Biden gets in because of what’s happening to the country. He talks about the border — the border is wide open,” he said. At another diner an hour away, Susan Matenson and her husband “love” Biden’s record and cannot fathom Trump back in the Oval Office. “Biden has accomplished a lot. He’s bringing down drug prices,” she said. As older Americans, both Piccola and Matenson are part of a demographic of voters considered the most reliable, which is why candidates covet their support. And in a tight election like this November, their choices at the ballot box could be make or break for two candidates who themselves are seniors. In the last presidential election, roughly 52% of voters 65 years and older backed Donald Trump. But recent polling suggests the loyalties of older voters may shift, with Biden stronger with that bloc than the last cycle. Some polls show Biden may even hold a slight edge. A New York Times-Siena College poll released last month, for example, found Biden leading Trump with voters 65 and older, 48% to 45%. Political analyst Todd Belt, who leads the political management program at The George Washington University, notes that with months to go before election day, things are volatile and could change. “One of the things that we know about older voters is they are genuinely afraid of big changes. And usually that has come from Democrats, not Republicans. But of course, when you have Donald Trump in the mix, he’s always a wildcard,” he said explaining recent trends in polling. The Biden campaign is labeling Trump a risk to the future of social security and Medicare, pointing to his inconsistent statements about the programs, including a suggestion he is open to cuts. At the same time, they are touting the Biden administration’s work capping out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs and insulin. Looking to build momentum, just this week the campaign launched a new “Seniors for Biden-Harris” initiative, complete with phone banks and some uniquely senior-focused activities, like pickleball tournaments and bingo nights. Explaining the strategy, former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who is serving as a surrogate for the Biden campaign, says “you’ve got to go where voters are.” “You got to talk to people about where they are in life these days and what they depend on. And in the case of seniors, it’s getting out and staying active, but it’s also Medicare, Social Security,” he continued. Spectrum News reached out to the Trump campaign repeatedly, asking to talk about why they believe they are a better fit for older voters. They did not respond by deadline, though a campaign spokesperson has previously walked back the possibility of entitlement cuts while arguing Trump would put the programs on a stronger footing by building a better economy.

Up to the 1960s, party choice was generally viewed as a result of stable party identifications and social class (“Michigan school”). Party preferences and political attitudes were assumed to be shaped during an individual's ‘formative’ or ‘impressionable’ years in adolescence and early adulthood, and to remain highly stable thereafter. Subsequent literature has criticized this view based on the recognition that citizens may well change their partisan preferences and ideological positioning over the life cycle. Consistent with the latter view, our analysis shows that people shift to more left-leaning parties up to midlife and then become more likely to swing back towards rightist political parties. These results are obtained using four decades of high-quality Norwegian Election Studies, which feature individual-level rotating panels that allow us to track party shifts over a fixed four-year election cycle.

While our analysis rests on a methodological innovation that allows identifying (non-linear) age effects while controlling for cohort and period effects, it naturally remains a challenge to track the exact mechanisms underlying this result. Nonetheless, our findings by and large reject the notion that social and political ageing can account for much of individuals' tendency to shift towards the right of the political spectrum as they age. This also implies that shifts in party choices over the life cycle are unlikely to be due to differences in individuals’ reliance on public sector transfers and services that accompany such social and political ageing. An alternative mechanism is that party choices can shift over the life-cycle due to changing perspectives on national identify and cultural values. Our evidence here provides partial support. While we find no evidence that fiscal policy preferences affect our estimated age affect, immigration, environmental and rural policy preferences do appear to account for a significant part of the observed ageing effect in vote choices.

Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to explore the role that changes over the life-cycle in individuals’ psychological traits may have on the ageing effects observed in our analysis. Previous research, however, has found some evidence suggestive of age-related psychological and personality changes. For instance, ageing has been linked to increasing levels of conservatism, authoritarianism, prejudice, and self-discipline, as well as lower levels of openness to change and cognitive flexibility (for reviews, see Tilley and Evans, 2014; Peterson et al., 2020). Evaluating whether – and, if so, to what extent – such psychological changes can account for the observed ageing effect would require direct measures of psychological traits at multiple points across the life-cycle. While these are not included in our dataset, we consider the further empirical verification of such psychological mechanisms an important avenue for future research.

Finally, we show that life-cycle effects in individuals’ vote choice are somewhat stronger among individuals with lower income levels. Hence, while the average aging effect observed within our overall sample is unaffected when controlling for income, different income groups within our sample display distinct (subgroup-average) age effects. This suggests that the increasing tendency among well-earning professionals to support left-wing parties in recent decades (e.g., Häusermann et al., 2012; Attewell, 2021; Gethin et al., 2022) need not exclusively derive from generational replacement or cohort effects – as recently argued by, among others, Gethin et al. (2022).