[Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 17 points with voters over 65. But
his margin is only half of that against Joe Biden, according to recent
polls.] [[link removed]]

TRUMP’S WEAKNESS WITH OLDER VOTERS COULD COST HIM FLORIDA – AND
THE WHITE HOUSE  
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S.V. Date
October 27, 2020
Huffington Post
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_ Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 17 points with voters over 65. But
his margin is only half of that against Joe Biden, according to recent
polls. _

Carolee McReynolds, 77, staffs a lonely pro-Biden outpost at an early
voting site in The Villages, long a Republican stronghold in central
Florida. , S.V. Date/HuffPost

 

Male, 58 years old, a lifelong Republican. Voted for candidate Donald
Trump in 2016 yet refuses to have anything to do with President Donald
Trump [[link removed]] in 2020 for a
host of reasons, but especially his botched response to the pandemic.

“I voted for him because I wasn’t a Hillary Clinton fan. I said,
gosh, he couldn’t be worse than Hillary Clinton. I was mistaken,”
he said after emerging from the Pinellas County office building after
casting his ballot for Trump’s Democratic opponent. “We know who
he is this time around. This time around, he’s a known quantity.”

This newly minted Democratic voter spoke on condition of anonymity
because, as a real estate agent, a good number of people in his social
group and his clients are Trump supporters. He’s a mirror of the
so-called “shy Trump voter” who will not admit to supporting the
president because of peer pressure. And how common or uncommon he is
in Florida, with its vast 50-and-older population, will likely
determine whether Trump keeps his job next week or retires to his
newly adopted home state himself.

With its 29 electoral votes, Florida has more than Michigan and
Wisconsin combined, and would almost certainly guarantee a Trump loss
should Democrat Joe Biden manage to win the state.

“If you bring Florida home, this thing’s over,” former President
Barack Obama said during a weekend visit to the Miami Springs campaign
office of his vice president.

 

Bringing Florida home for Biden doesn’t even require winning those
older voters who make up fully half of the state’s likely
electorate. It just means cutting into Trump’s enormous margins with
that group four years ago — a phenomenon that appears to be
happening already.

“Right now, Trump has a bare majority with them in Florida. That’s
a very bad outcome for him,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime GOP
consultant in the state and a prominent Trump critic. He attributed
the president’s problem with the group “almost 100%” to his
response to the coronavirus pandemic, which included downplaying it
from the outset and at one point calling it a hoax.

“When Granny realizes she’s not going to see her grandson’s
graduation or go to a family reunion, or pretty much anything, without
the risk of dying, it tends to have a negative political impact,”
Wilson said.

LOSING VOTERS WITH LITTLE MARGIN TO LOSE

Trump, for his part, has always counted on winning Florida and has
boasted of it with a certainty not necessarily warranted by facts.

In 2016, while the Hillary Clinton campaign had built an expensive
voter turnout machine that, in the end, failed to bring younger Black
and Latino voters to the polls, Trump was helped by the perennially
effective operation created in recent decades by the state Republican
Party.

Trump managed to win the state, but only by 1.2 percentage points, or
112,911 votes. A big part of that win was maintaining support among
older voters, many of them retirees, who have traditionally supported
Republicans because of their opposition to tax increases.

According to the 2016 exit polls, Trump defeated Clinton 55-43, or 12
percentage points, among voters aged 50-64, who made up 29% of the
state’s electorate. Among voters 65 and older, who made up 21% of
the electorate, Trump won by a staggering 17 percent margin, 57-40.

Recent polling, though, shows that Trump has lost that big margin with
Florida’s seniors. A recent CBS/YouGov poll conducted over three
days last week finds Trump with just an 8-point margin over Biden
among both the 45-64 age group as well as 65 and over.

That change with older Floridians tracks Trump’s slippage
nationally, where his problem with those high-propensity voters is
even worse.

In 2016, Trump won the 50-64 age group by 8 points and the 65 and over
group by 7 points. According to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, Trump
is now actually trailing Biden among voters aged 45-64 by 3 points.
Among voters 65 and over, he is down 10 points, 51-41.

That swing does not surprise David Longacre, 61, who said Trump’s
repeated minimizing of the coronavirus has enraged the cohort most
susceptible to the disease’s deadly complications.

“He wouldn’t listen to anyone,” said Longacre, a regional sales
manager for an air conditioning firm, after casting his ballot for
Biden at the downtown St. Petersburg early voting site. “He wanted
to think he knew everything, and he didn’t.”

One top Republican close to Trump, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said the campaign feels confident it has not lost that much
ground with older voters and predicted a 3-point win next week.

“We’re in really good shape in Florida,” he said, but then added
that knowing this with any certainty was difficult because the
campaign is not conducting a tracking poll in a number of key states.
“Florida, and we’re not polling. It’s weird.” 

TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL FANS STILL LOYAL 

While claiming that the Trump campaign is carrying out all the
necessary activities of a normal campaign, spokesperson Tim Murtaugh
would not address the specific question of a Florida tracking poll,
which closely monitors the electorate in a race’s closing days.

However, Wilson, the GOP consultant, said there’s nothing weird
about not having a daily tracking poll — once it’s understood that
the campaign is running out of money.

“A lot of their polling contractors stopped getting paid in
September, so they’re not doing work,” he said. “They’re
broke. They’re largely flying blind right now.”

Whether Trump is monitoring the strength of his support or not,
though, most longtime Republicans remain in his corner — even as
they make excuses for his coronavirus response.

Nancy Cullinane, a 71-year-old retired teacher and administrator who
moved to Florida from Kentucky, defended Trump’s continued
downplaying of the disease. “I don’t think you want to share that
fear with 300 million people,” she said after emerging from the
North Collier Regional Park offices in Naples, where she had just cast
her vote for Trump.

“I think the president has done a wonderful job keeping an even
keel,” said Joanne Joachim, a 64-year-old retiree originally from
Rhode Island, after voting for Trump at the Laurel Manor Recreation
Center in The Villages, a central Florida Republican stronghold.
“Nobody’s perfect. ... We’re still under 300,000 deaths. I
believe that’s a small percentage of the population.”

Ed Carron, a 55-year-old who lives with his parents there,
acknowledged that Trump may not have done the best job with the
pandemic. “Maybe his COVID handling could have been better,” he
said, but added that he doubted anyone else would have done it much
differently and that Trump likely gets more criticism because of his
bombastic approach to everything. “His mouth does get him into
trouble.”

That trouble, though, may result in Trump losing enough of his 2016
older voters to lose the state.

Even in The Villages, Biden campaign volunteer Carolee McReynolds, 77,
said she has seen signs of defections. In the recreation center
parking lot, sitting in front of her 2009 Ford minivan emblazoned with
Biden-Harris signs, she waved and shouted out as the occasional
pro-Biden voter would walk or drive past.

“He’s a disaster as a human being,” she said of Trump. “I
think he’s losing support.”

Joe Eisegruber, 80, is a Villages resident who says he was once a
straight-ticket Republican voter but, in the age of Trump, has started
backing Democrats in other races, too. “I wouldn’t vote for that
son of a bitch for all the tea in China,” he said of Trump. “I
don’t think he knows what he’s doing.”

Some 300 miles to the south, Julie Rivas has come to that same
conclusion.

The 64-year-old retiree, who does not follow politics particularly
closely, said she voted for Trump in 2016. But walking out of Miami
Beach City Hall on a recent rainy evening after casting a ballot for
Biden, she said the president’s inability to deliver on his
promises, as well as his cavalier handling of the coronavirus, made
her change her mind.

“We all make mistakes. It’s hard for him to resolve all the
world’s problems,” she said. “But somebody has to do better.”

S.V. Date, Senior White House Correspondent, HuffPost

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