[ Ten thousand Americans turn 60 every day, and on average we’ll
live another 23 years. We’ll vote in huge numbers, as we always do.
One possibility is that we’ll help turn back the clock a little,
toward the world we actually built in our youth.]
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OLDER VOTERS KNOW EXACTLY WHAT’S AT STAKE, AND THEY’LL BE HERE
FOR QUITE A WHILE  
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Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood
January 22, 2023
New York Times
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_ Ten thousand Americans turn 60 every day, and on average we’ll
live another 23 years. We’ll vote in huge numbers, as we always do.
One possibility is that we’ll help turn back the clock a little,
toward the world we actually built in our youth. _

Image credit: Min Heo / New York Times,

 

Is it time to call the next election “the most important in American
history”? Probably. It seems like it may involve a judgment on
democracy itself. Americans with a lot of history will play a key role
in determining its outcome.

And judging in part by November’s midterms, they may not play the
role that older voters are usually assigned. We at Third Act, the
group we helped form in 2021, think older Americans are beginning a
turn in the progressive direction, a turn that will accelerate as time
goes on.

A lot has been written about the impact of young voters in
November’s contests, and rightly so. The enormous margins that
Democrats ran up among voters under 30 let them squeak through in race
after race. Progressives should be incredibly grateful that the next
generation can see straight through Trumpism in a way too many of
their elders can’t.

But there were also intriguing hints of what looked like a gray
countercurrent that helped damp the expected red wave. Yes, older
people by and large voted Republican, in keeping with what political
scientists have long insisted: that we become more conservative as we
age. But in the 63 most competitive congressional districts, the
places where big money was spent on ads and where the margin in the
House was decided, polling
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AARP, an advocacy group for people over 50, found some fascinating
numbers.

In early summer, Republicans had a sturdy lead among older voters in
50 of those districts, up 50 percent to 40 percent. Those had
Republicans salivating. But on Election Day, voters over 65 actually
broke for Democrats in those districts, 49 to 46.

That doesn’t surprise us at Third Act. We’re nonpartisan, but
we’ve learned that demographic is far less settled than people
sometimes suppose.

Some of the issues that benefited Democrats are obvious, of course.
Republican messaging included calls
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weakening Social Security and Medicare even though most older
beneficiaries rely on Social Security for most of their income
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an estimated 40 percent
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all their retirement income. The cruelty of toying with people’s
life support systems is matched only by its political foolishness.
Among voters 65 and over, Social Security and Medicare were among the
top concerns.

But something else happened, too. When the Supreme Court tossed out
Roe v. Wade in early summer, most of the pictures were of young women
protesting, appropriately, since it’s their lives that will be
turned upside down. But people we know in their 60s and 70s felt a
real psychic upheaval: A woman’s right to choose had been part of
their mental furniture for five decades. And they’ve lived their
entire lives in what they had imagined was a stable and working
democracy.

The top concern to voters 65 and over, especially women, was
“threats to democracy,” according to AARP. And exit polling
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the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among women 50 and older, the
court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion
had a major impact on which candidate they supported. Sixty-six
percent of Black women said so, as did 61 percent of Hispanic women
and 48 percent of white women. Voters who said the Supreme Court’s
abortion decision was the single most important factor in their vote
supported Democrats two to one.

Some of our members helped organize access to abortion before Roe was
decided in 1973; they don’t want to go back. And it’s not only
abortion: The Supreme Court also took on the Clean Air Act of 1970 and
the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We helped win these fights once,
turning out by the tens of millions to oppose the war in Vietnam or
for the first Earth Day. And we can help win them again — we have
the muscle memory of what organizing on a big scale feels like.

Hundreds of us from around the country converged on Nevada in the days
before the midterm vote, because we determined — correctly, as it
turned out — that it might be the place where control of the Senate
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be decided. We may walk a tad slower door to door, but in this case
slow and steady helped to win the race.

With the election past, Third Act is now digging into work on climate
change — in particular targeting the big American banks (JPMorgan
Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America) that are also the
biggest lenders [[link removed]] to the
fossil fuel industry. On March 21 we’ll be cutting up bank credit
cards and picketing bank branches across the country. We know that
young people have been in the lead in this fight, because they’ll
have to live with the world we’re creating. But as long as we’re
still here, we’ll have to live with the knowledge of what we’re
leaving behind, so we want to change it while we still can.

We recognize that this will require a sustained effort beyond the next
election and the election after that. Numerous analysts and
demographers do believe that coming demographic changes in the United
States will generally favor Democrats. But complications abound.
Partisan gerrymandering continues to favor Republicans, for instance,
and at least five states
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generally vote Democratic have each lost a seat from their
congressional delegations.

But here’s the thing. Many of us are going to be here for quite a
while. Ten thousand Americans turn 60 every day, and on average
we’ll live an additional 23 years. The last of the baby boomers
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be 65 or older in 2030. Youth voters, moreover, are youth voters for
only about a decade. One guarantee for 2024: We’ll vote in huge
numbers, as we always do. One possibility is that we’ll help turn
back the clock a little, toward the world we actually built in our
youth.

We’re not your parents’ grandparents.

_[BILL MCKIBBEN [[link removed]] is the
founder of Third Act, helped found the climate advocacy group 350.org
and is the author of the memoir “The Flag, the Cross, and the
Station Wagon.” AKAYA WINDWOOD
[[link removed]] is the lead
adviser for Third Act and a co-author of “Leading With Joy.”]_

* Third Act
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* older voters
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* Seniors
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* Baby Boomers
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* Boomers
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* Retirees
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* Climate Crisis
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* women's rights
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* abortion rights
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* Trade unionists
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* peace activists
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* civil rights movement
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* Environmental Activism
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* Social Movements
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* 1960s
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* 2024 Elections
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