Kamala Harris may be the first Democratic presidential nominee to win seniors since Al Gore

It has been brought to our attention that Kamala Harris appears to be having difficulty with some types of voters, or at the very least, she is not performing as well with these groups as Joe Biden did with them four years ago. But the vice president has a little advantage over Donald Trump in terms of the national vote. That is not feasible, is it?

It turns out that Harris is also doing unusually well for a Democrat among demographics that her party’s former presidential nominees have performed poorly with. This is the case with populations that she is running against.

One of these groups is the elderly population. Since Al Gore in the year 2000, Harris has the potential to become the first Democrat to defeat voters aged 65 and older.

Consider the latest national polls results. This week, a CNN and SSRS conducted a poll that showed Harris has come on top to lead among the senior citizens with a level of fifty percent to forty-six percent. Our survey does not present an exception. Based on the average survey, Harris leads Trump three points among seniors.

As for the details, that is a significant swing compared to the final projections from 2020 and before Biden dropped out of the contest in July. The polling average from earlier this year, as well as an analysis of the election results from 2020, showed that Trump enjoyed a four-point edge over Biden among voters 65 years of age and above.

Really, though, the exciting revelation is that she’s doing better among older citizens than any other Democrat heading into her. Not exactly surprising in a world, though-Biden performed significantly better among voters aged 65 and over in 2020 than Barack Obama did in 2012, while at the same time performing similarly well across the board in comparison to all voters.

However, any gains with older citizens would come at a crucial time for Harris, who is experiencing some difficulties — for a Democrat — among young people in the average national poll. This would be a welcome development for Harris.

A trade of younger people for older voters could be beneficial for Harris’s campaign, despite the fact that no campaign wants to lose voters entirely. The number of senior citizens in the United States is more than the number of adults under the age of thirty.

Further, seniors in the United States are registered to vote and vote more than younger Americans, which makes seniors a far more viable electoral force than young people. Recent surveys conducted by Siena College and The New York Times found that seniors account for about 29% of the electorate, while voters younger than age 30 account for less than about 13% of the electorate.

Although absolute numbers vary from state to state, the general sense that the electorate is much, much older than the voters 18 – 29 years old also holds for swing states.

And the strength of the older voting bloc vis a vis the power of the younger voting bloc only grows stronger. In 1980, for instance, twenty-two percent of the electorate was comprised of individuals under the age of thirty. According to figures provided by the United States Census Bureau, just 17% of the population consisted of senior citizens. In the year 2000 seniors made up a larger proportion at 20% compared to people less than 30 years old.

Of course, there is always the possibility that the pre-election polling conducted was not reliable. For the past four years, there have been indications that older voters are changing their preferences toward the Democratic Party. It turned out that Trump would end up winning them, but by a lower margin than one might have anticipated given the margin of victory in the national vote.

However, four years of polling showed that Biden was holding up all right among the young compared to the average Democrat. That is quite different from the situation today. And as it turned out, the poll proved wrong in its assumption that the other guy was just in a spot where he could take advantage of Biden.

It is interesting to note that this possible age depolarization among the oldest and youngest portions of the electorate coincides with the racial depolarization that is also occurring. In the same way that Harris is performing better than Biden did among white voters, Trump is doing really well for a Republican among voters of African-American and Hispanic identity.

I raise the racial depolarization argument because the math is comparable for Harris. With any race, she’s losing support with smaller shares of the electorate (Black and Hispanic voters), while she seems to be gaining support with a larger piece of the electorate (White voters). This is similar to the state of affairs with age demographics.

This compromise is currently functioning nicely enough for Harris to be considered successful in the polls. One of the questions that desires to be replied is whether or not it’ll maintain to paintings for her, or whether or not or now not Trump’s profits amongst more youthful, Black, and Hispanic voters could be extra sizeable than any advances Harris has made with White and older citizens.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, it seems more likely that we will see voters who are less divided among the positive major categories that we know we see. This is the case no matter what.