Clifford Wagner, an 80-year-old Republican in Tucson, Ariz., never cared for President Trump.
He supported Jeb Bush within the 2016 presidential primary race and cast a protest to choose the overall election for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee. An Air Force veteran, Mr. Wagner described the Trump presidency as a mortifying experience: His friends in Europe and Japan tell him the us has become “the laughingstock of the planet .”
This year, Mr. Wagner said he would register his opposition to Mr. Trump more emphatically than he did in 2016. He plans to vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, and hopes the election may be a ruinous one for the Republican Party.
“I’m a Christian, and that I don't believe the hateful, racist, bigoted speech that the president uses,” Mr. Wagner said, adding, “As very much like I never thought I’d say this, I hope we get a Democratic president, a Democratic-controlled Senate and maintain a Democratic-controlled House.”
Mr. Wagner is a component of 1 of the foremost important maverick voting groups within the 2020 general election: conservative-leaning seniors who have soured on the Republican Party over the past four years.
Republican presidential candidates typically carry older voters by solid margins, and in his first campaign, Mr. Trump bested Hillary Clinton by seven percentage points with voters over 65. He won white seniors by nearly triple that margin.
Today, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are tied among seniors, consistent with a poll of registered voters conducted by The NY Times and Siena College. And within the six most vital battleground states, Mr. Biden has established a transparent whip hand, leading Mr. Trump by six percentage points among the oldest voters and nearly matching the president’s support among whites therein age bracket.
That is no small advantage for Mr. Biden, the previous vice chairman, given the prevalence of retirement communities during a few of these crucial states, including Arizona and Florida.
No Democrat has won or broken even with seniors in 20 years, since Gore in 2000 devoted much of his general-election campaign to warning that Republicans would cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. In 2016, Mr. Trump, now 74, seemed in some ways keenly attuned to the political sensitivities of voters in his own age bracket. As a candidate, he bluntly rejected his party’s longstanding interest in restructuring government guarantees of retirement security.
But Mr. Trump’s presidency has been a trying experience for several of those voters, several who are now so frustrated and disillusioned that they're preparing to require the drastic step of supporting a Democrat.
The grievances of those defecting seniors are familiar, most or all of them shared by their younger peers. But these voters often express themselves with a very sharp quite dismay and disappointment. They see Mr. Trump as coarse and disrespectful, divisive to his core, and failing persistently to comport himself with the dignity of the opposite presidents that they need to be observed for quite half a century. the days poll also found that the majority of seniors disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of race relations and therefore the protests after the death of George Floyd.
And because the coronavirus pandemic continues to comb the country, putting older Americans at particular risk, these voters feel a special quite frustration and betrayal with Mr. Trump’s ineffective leadership and often-blasé public comments about the crisis.
The president has urged the country to return to life-as-usual much more quickly than the highest public-health officials in his own administration have recommended. Some prominent Republican officials and conservative pundits have even suggested sometimes that older people should be willing to risk their own health for the sake of a quicker resumption of the trade cycle.
In The Times poll, seniors within the battleground states disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic by seven points, 52 percent to 45 percent. By a 26-point margin, this group said the federal should prioritize containing the pandemic over reopening the economy.
Former Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida, a 40-year-old Republican deeply versed within the politics of the retiree-rich swing state, said many seniors were disturbed by important aspects of Mr. Trump’s record and located Mr. Biden a light and respectable alternative who didn't inspire an equivalent antipathy on the proper that Mrs. Clinton did in 2016.
Regarded by much of his own party as bland and traditional, Mr. Biden’s nostalgia-cloaked candidacy could also be uniquely equipped to ease a large group of right-of-center seniors into the Democratic column, a minimum of for one election.
“He’s not ever been known to be a radical or an extreme leftist or liberal, so there's certainly a degree of comfort there,” Mr. Curbelo said. He added: “This public health crisis is so threatening, especially to seniors, and since the president hasn’t earned high marks in his handling of it, I feel that has also been an element in Biden’s improving numbers.”
0 Comments