FLIP A COIN FOR THE WINNER IN NOVEMBER, EITHER SIDE COULD BE CORRECT

…President Trump & Joe Biden

American seniors may not support the president this time.

There is a 74 year old man in Florida that up until Donald Trump became the party’s nominee, he had been a "dyed-in-the wool Republican".  He says that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for someone who lies, belittles others, walks out on his bills and mistreats women.  However, he also couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton. So he didn’t vote in 2016.  Being a senior myself, I fully appreciate how this senior feels today.

Up to today, the president hasn’t done anything to bring this former Republican back.  The man is now an Independent, and he plans to vote for Joe Biden.

This Floridian lives in a community where several people live in his gated community that have gotten sick, and at least one has died. He worries about his own health as he has an autoimmune disease.  He also worries about his adult children, including a daughter who has recently gone back to work and a son whose pay has been cut.  “Regardless of what they say about his senior moments, I think he [Biden] would be good and would take good care of the country,” he said. 

This man at one time had owned a furniture and fireplace-supply stores in central Pennsylvania.  All of this before retiring to Florida.

While Democrats have worried about Biden’s struggles to excite younger voters, older voters who are upset with the president are poised to be potentially more influential in November.  This is especially true in swing states whose populations skew their way, like in Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.

In Florida, more than 20% of those who voted in  the 2016 election were over age 65, according to exit polls.  In 2016, Trump won the Florida senior vote by a 17-point margin over Clinton, according to the exit polls. This state ranks as one that Trump must almost certainly win to insure his victory, while Biden has other paths to the White House.

For months, Biden has been more popular than Trump with American seniors.  A national poll of registered voters released by Quinipiac University last week shows Biden leading by 10 percentage points among voters over 65.  A Quinipiac poll in late April found 52% of Florida seniors supporting Biden to 42% for Trump, while a Fox News poll around the same time found Biden narrowly ahead.  (Of course, Trump now thinks that Fox should get new pollsters.)

“We have the ability to sway this election,” Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Terrie Rizzo declared as she opened an on-line town hall with fellow seniors earlier this month.  The town hall included a tutorial on voting by mail. “Trump has failed us and it is now our turn,” Ms. Rizzo stated.

The negative attitude toward the president among some seniors comes as their lives have been drastically altered by Covid-19.  And this issue has swept through nursing homes and retirement communities across the country.  In Florida, more than 80% of the 2,000-plus people killed by the virus have been over 65 years old.  This is according to an analysis by the Tampa Bay Times. Even as the state has begun to respond, most seniors have remained hidden in their homes at the urging of their doctors, or their adult children and grandchildren.  Most of these seniors no longer gather with others to dine, play cards, enjoy golf or the pool.  Nor do they discuss politics.

Concern runs deep among those loyal to the president.  David Israel, is an 80-year-old Republican who lives in the Century Village Retirement Community in West Palm Beach.  He is frustrated that the state didn’t bring coronavirus testing directly into his community of 7,000 and it has not done enough contact tracing following the confirmed cases.  He and other residents hired a private testing company, which has done 1,100 so far and found just four cases.

“We are clearly highly susceptible,” Mr. Israel said. “We’re missing testing, and we’re missing contact tracing. We need to see that.”  He agreed that Trump is more concerned about the economic crisis than the health issue for seniors.  He thinks all of that, given that the president has a background in business.  Even though he thinks Trump is “a little brusque, a little abrupt,” Israel said, he thinks Trump has accomplished a lot.

“If it’s Trump versus Biden, I would still support Trump, but this point about testing, everybody should be tested,” he said. “I don’t see how else we’re going to get on top of this.”

Whether the shift seen in polling since Trump’s election continues through Election Day is as unpredictable as is the course of the virus.  The election will probably depend on it.  Yolanda Russell, who leads the Florida Democratic Senior Caucus, is still waiting to see whether the crisis leads more seniors to consider Biden.  Or will it only further entrenches Trump’s supporters…?  The state party and Biden’s organizers have been doing “wellness checks,” by calling older Democrats to see what they need and encouraging them to register to vote by mail.

Before the virus crisis, Ms. Russell said, many Florida seniors were already very lonely or they struggled to get groceries, to find affordable housing or to pay for their prescriptions.  At a time when so much of life has moved inside and is now online, some seniors have only a simple flip phone and lack access to the Internet.

Each week for the past two months, someone Russell knows has been killed by Covid-19.  First it was her friend’s sister right here in Florida, then her cousin’s husband in Texas, followed by a friend’s mother in Detroit, a friend in Oregon and others. All are black, like her.  There have been graveside services, with some seniors watching from their cars, but no gatherings in churches to mourn and pray for them.

“When the phone rings, you’re like: Okay, what now?” said Russell, who is 66 and who used to work in public health in Oregon. “Every phase of this has been tragic and traumatizing.”

Biden, at 77, and Trump, at 73, are themselves seniors.  They were born during and just after World War II to parents who had weathered the Great Depression.  They both came of age during the civil rights movement, and witnessed the first man walking on the moon, the creation of Medicare, the women’s liberation movement, the terrorist attacks on 9/11.  They witnessed the rounds of foreign wars and natural disasters, the Great Recession and the invention of the Internet, cellphones and Twitter. But their leadership styles provides voters with a stark choice between these two individuals.

Biden has taken on the cautions of his generation in recent months, quarantining in his Delaware home after those in his age group were asked to curb their activities to lessen their chances of being infected.

Trump, on the other hand has poo-pooed the recommendations about social distancing and the use of masks.  He has openly yearned for his mass rallies that once defined his political campaign.  

“I’ve seen a lot. I was in the Vietnam War. I had my own business,” Said the senior who had lived in Pennsylvania when the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant partially melted down in 1979. “It was panic, but we  had leadership in that event. And, in fact, in a lot of events.  Presidents have in the past given leadership or comfort. But there is nothing coming from our current president.”

Discussion of this latest crisis with seniors generally tends to fall along political lines: Those who already supported the president, they defend him.  Those who already disliked the president, they attack him.  There is seemingly little room for a crossover.

At the On Top of the World retirement community in Clearwater, Fla., Marvin and Sue Lazernik regularly watch the president’s press briefings and they debate whom they most trust on the topic.  It’s never Trump, who talks too much and seems to repeat himself, they say.  It’s also not Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who seems to contradict himself and, they believe, has undermined the president. They like Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and they appreciate that she lays out what she doesn’t know along with what she does know, instead of giving the easy answer.

The margins of victory for either candidate in Florida is so narrow that even a relatively minor defection could cost Trump the state.  Florida Democratic leaders make it clear that they have yet to see a massive exodus of senior voters from Trump’s base of support.  But they say that if Biden can pull in 5% to 10% of the older Floridians who voted last time for Trump, Biden could win.

The Trump campaign has publicly dismissed suggestions that the president is struggling with some older voters, but he has begun to acknowledge that the health and economic crisis is having a bigger impact on seniors. At the same time, Trump and his surrogates have also continued to attack Biden’s mental acuity, calling him “Sleepy Joe” and trying to paint him as a doddering old man.  It’s a formulation that Biden allies believe won’t help the president win over voters of the same age.

Assessing the damage to Trump’s prospects is highly difficult.  In more than two dozen interviews with older Republicans and conservative-leaning independents throughout the state, most had few complaints, and those who did were hesitant to publicly criticize the president.

Tom, a 74-year-old retiree and Republican-leaning independent living in northeast Florida, vacationed in Hong Kong and Vietnam in January.  When he landed at the airport in Los Angeles in early February, no one took his temperature or asked where he had been traveling, which was a standard procedure in other countries.  “January and February were totally wasted by Trump. Totally wasted,” he said, asking that his full name not be used for fear of receiving scorn from his Republican neighbors and golf partners. “To Trump, in my opinion, the virus is nothing more than an inconvenience to him and his political ambitions. And he doesn’t really care. I don’t believe he cares about the people. I don’t think he cares about who is affected by the virus. I think it’s really for him just a big inconvenience.”

Tom has voted for Republicans about 70% of the time, but he voted for Obama twice.  He couldn’t vote for Clinton because he didn’t think she was “presidential material,” but he also could not bring himself to vote for Trump. He instead wrote in the name of a friend for president.

This year, he donated to the presidential campaign of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MI) and now plans to vote for Biden.  “I hope Biden wins,” he said. “I also hope he handles himself well.”

In South Florida, Julio, a 68-year-old who also considers himself a fiscally conservative independent, has delayed retirement so he and his wife, who both have serious health conditions, won’t suffer disruptions to their health insurance. The couple rarely leave the house and heavily disinfect all deliveries. He jokes that they are “under house arrest without the ankle bracelet.”

After voting twice for Obama, he didn’t vote in 2016, but wasn’t upset that Trump won, as he thought the businessman deserved a chance.

“I thought it would be a pretty interesting ride, and I wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t think it would be so disastrous for the economy”, said Julio.  But Julio also did not want his full name to be used, to avoid offending co-workers who support the president. “He wants to say things, whether they’re true or not, to ingratiate himself.  It’s a problem.  There’s a trust factor there. I don’t even listen to him anymore because I can’t believe what he says. I wait until the apologies come later and the clarifications come later to understand what he really meant.”

He definitely will not vote for Trump, but he’s unsure if he will vote for Biden. He’s concerned by the Obama administration’s investigation into Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, and an allegation of sexual assault leveled by a former Senate aide that Biden has denied. He also worries that Biden is just as prone to errors as Trump.

“He’s Mr. Gaffe. He can’t make a statement without messing it up it seems. He just messes things up. . . . There’s always something going on. He has to be as scripted as our president does,” he said. “I mean, I know we’re not going to vote in a saint, but there are a lot of concerns.”

The reality is that as bad as Trump has been, the concerns for Joe Biden are there for those former Republican conservatives that no longer have a conservative party in the style of their real idol, President Ronald Reagan.

This is all making the November election so interesting for both parties.

Copyright G. Ater 2020