Let's Get This Show On The Road And Off The Rails... And Bask In The Trumplessness

 

The two big national polls released early Sunday morning-- Ipsos' for Reuters and Hart Research's for NBC and the Wall Street Journal-- were conducted after the debate and after God struck Trump and his inner circle down with COVID-19. Overall, they don't differ much. Basically, Biden opened his widest lead in a month after Donald tested positive for COVID and "a majority of Americans think Trump could have avoided infection if he had taken the virus more seriously. The Oct. 2-3 national opinion poll gave little indication of an outpouring of support for the president beyond Trump’s core group of followers, some of whom [the Proud Boys and other neo-Nazi groups] have gathered outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where the president has been hospitalized."

The Reuters poll shows Trump losing by 10 points (landslide territory)-- 51-41%. The NBC/WSJ poll has Trump losing by an astounding 14 points-- 53-39%, a lot worse than their poll before the debate when Trump was just down by 8 points. That 14 point divergence is the poll's best-ever for Biden against Trump.

Why did the floor for Trump finally start collapsing? Simple: seniors and suburban women. Seniors have turned on Trump and now back Biden 62-35% and just 33% of suburban women say they're voting for Trump. Even the cohort of men over 50 have moved from a 13 point advantage for Trump to a virtual tie-- a one point advantage for Biden!

Reporting for the Washington Post Sunday morning, Karen Heller wrote that "Americans 65 and older vote the way some people wish the entire country voted: regularly, passionately and in huge percentages, the largest of any age group. They are no-excuse, this-is-what-democracy-is-all-about voters. Four years ago, 71 percent of them cast ballots. They vote like their legacies depend on it."

When I was growing up, the seniors still remembered FDR and it was a strong part of the Democratic Party coalition. As these voters started dying off and as the Democratic Party started drifting away from what FDR stood for and morphing into a Clintonesque Frankenstein monster "big tent" party catering to Wall Street and rich campaign donors, the solidarity of this crucial bloc of voters dissipated. The last time the Democrats won a majority of the over-65 crowd was in 2000, and not by a big enough margin to win the election.

Heller wrote that "The Biden campaign hopes to end that drought. Polls and voting patterns suggest it very well could. In a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 52 percent of likely voters over 65 supported Biden, compared with 47 percent for President Trump. Four years ago, Trump won those voters over Hillary Clinton. Plenty of attention has centered on young activists’ and voters’ role in a Biden win. But, quite possibly, it may be older 'super-voters,' religiously participating in every election, who become the Democrats’ 2020 heroes-- even in a pandemic where they are the ones most at risk... They tend to like [Biden] more than they did Hillary Clinton."

These voters are a huge, engaged voting bloc in battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, where 26 percent of registered voters were older citizens in 2018, according to the Census. And did we mention they love to vote? Though they represent about 17 percent of America’s adults, they’re 25 percent of its registered voters.

They are emphatic, sometimes unprintable, in their scorn for Trump. They believe he takes them for granted, especially during the pandemic when their age group is most at risk.

“Trump is the biggest insult to aging. He thinks older people are low-hanging fruit,” says retired psychotherapist Andrea Shapiro Temko, 69, in an RBG T-shirt and skinny black jeans.

During July and August, 11 nursing home residents died every hour nationally because of the pandemic, according to a recent congressional report co-authored by Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-PA). Residents and staff account for 40 percent of all the nation’s covid-19 deaths.

“Trump just never talks about it. It’s just bizarre,” says Casey, 60, who grew up blocks from where Biden was raised in Scranton. “James Carville taught me a lot of things when I worked for him. People vote when they have a stake in the election.” Older voters “have the long view,” he says.

Adam Christensen, at 26 years old, is the youngest congressional candidate supported by Blue America this cycle-- another independent-minded progressive truth-teller like AOC (who will turn 31 a week from tomorrow). In north-central Florida, he and his team-- of mostly young people-- are working diligently to craft a coalition made up of voters of all ages, appealing on issues that appeal to millennials (like free college and racial justice) and to seniors (like rigorous protection of Social Security and expanded healthcare for all). I asked Christensen what he's doing to persuade older, independent voters in suburban and rural counties of his district to give up on the GOP and vote for someone the age of their grandchildren.

"The most important thing that we can do," he told me yesterday, "is just be real, be honest, and say exactly what we believe-- that if someone pays money their entire lives into a program that is an investment and they should get their money back; that Medicare should be expanded to cover dental and hearing and vision and SS should be expanded because many of the people relying on it are below the poverty line. The reason for this is that there are people scamming the system and not paying in as much as they are supposed to because there is a cap for the wealthy."

Adam told me that this line of thinking became "a very heated topic in the last forum with my opponent. She opened up by saying that 'we need to start having adult conservations about where the money is coming from for Medicare/Social Security and if we can continue to keep these programs.' Essentially what she did was try to talk to a group of senior citizens like they were children and act like they didn’t understand what money is or where it comes from. Anyone who is arrogant enough to lie to peoples' faces about the benefits they have earned is fighting a losing battle. Senior are fleeing the GOP because they are tired of being lied to and seeing their money taken. It is really that simple."