john manning

Bush's Popularity With Older Voters Is Seen
as Slipping
By ROBIN TONER
New York Times, October 19, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/politics/campaigns/19ELDE.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=


WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — President Bush's
support among older voters has dropped
substantially in recent months, eroding
recent Republican gains and highlighting
the importance of this critical electoral
bloc in 2004, political strategists and
****ysts say.

The trend underscores the stakes for Mr.
Bush in the current Congressional
negotiations aimed at creating a
long-promised prescription drug benefit in
Medicare, which covers 40 million elderly
and disabled Americans. Negotiators passed
a self-imposed deadline on Friday for
reaching agreement, but vowed to complete
their work before Congress adjourns, which
is expected to be sometime next month.

Mr. Bush's popularity has declined over all
since early summer, but some recent polls
suggest that he lost significantly more
ground among voters 65 and older than he
did among younger Americans. Politicians in
both parties consider older voters to be
particularly important because they are
much more likely to vote than younger
people, and because they are heavily
concentrated in states that are often
presidential battlegrounds, like Florida
and Pennsylvania.

Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, a
longtime Republican campaign strategist,
said, "It's still a very fluid vote that
can swing on a dime."

A poll conducted this month by The New York
Times and CBS News showed that Mr. Bush had
a 41 percent approval rating among the
65-and-older voters, his lowest among any
age group. That was down from 44 percent in
July and 63 percent in May.

Similar trends have been reported this fall
by the Pew Research Center. The latest
Gallup Poll, released this week, showed
that even as Mr. Bush's overall approval
rating had risen to 56 percent from 50
percent during the past month, voters older
than 65 remained his weakest age group.
Forty-nine percent of them approved of the
job he was doing, compared with 60 percent
of those 30 to 49.

****ysts in both parties cite the economy,
the stock market and the situation in Iraq
as major factors in the slippage, along
with more traditional concerns for older
Americans like Medicare and the cost of
prescription drugs.

Representative Robert T. Matsui of
California, the chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, said:
"With low interest rates and a sluggish
economy, they're the group that's probably
harmed the most. They're not getting the
rate of return they would have expected
with the savings they have."

Mr. Matsui added that while low inflation
is generally an advantage for those living
on fixed incomes, "health care costs have
gone up unabated, and that's the area
they're most concerned about."

Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, said that
despite recent improvements in the stock
market, which is closely followed by
retirees, "there's a lot of ground to make
up." That could be hurting Mr. Bush's
standing among some older males, or
contributing to what Mr. Goeas described as
"grumpy old men."

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who
works with Mr. Goeas on a bipartisan survey
known as the Battleground Poll, said that
the aftermath of the war in Iraq, including
the cost of reconstruction, also helped
explain the erosion of Mr. Bush's support
among older voters. "Seniors had really
moved toward Bush on the security issue
during the war, and now they're moving
back," she said. "They hate spending the
$87 billion over in Iraq."

Ms. Lake added that "this is one group that
doesn't like deficits, because they feel
they jeopardize Social Security and Medicare.'

Democrats, who pride themselves on their
advocacy of Social Security and Medicare,
have long relied on the votes of older
Americans. But that bloc has been
increasingly up for grabs in recent years,
in part because of the passing of the
heavily Democratic generation that came of
age with the New Deal, but also,
strategists say, because Republicans have
grown far more adept at cultivating older
Americans.

In 2000, Mr. Bush lost the 60-and-older
vote to Vice President Al Gore 51 to 47
percent, but Republicans carried it in last
year's Congressional elections, as well as
the Congressional elections of 1998, 1996
and 1994. The Republican victory margin was
particularly wide in 1998, when President
Bill Clinton was in the throes of the
impeachment struggle; the margin was widely
attributed to older voters' concerns over
Mr. Clinton's values.

Mindful of the importance of this group,
many Republicans consider it a top priority
to deliver a Medicare drug benefit before
next year's election. This could be, many
Republican strategists have argued, a
transformational event in American politics
— a Republican president and a Republican
Congress producing the biggest expansion of
Medicare, a signature Democratic program,
since the program's creation.

But the effort to produce a popular benefit
with $400 billion over 10 years has not
been easy; the bills that emerged from the
House and Senate fall far short of what
many working people typically receive, with
large co-payments and gaps in coverage.
Many older Americans have also voiced
concerns to their lawmakers that they could
end up losing coverage they already get
from their former employers, which is
sometimes better than what the government
would provide.

Jack Banister, a retiree in Hanover, Ind.,
and a strong supporter of Mr. Bush, who was
interviewed for the recent New York
Times/CBS News Poll, said: "I'd sure like
them to leave the prescription drug thing
alone. A lot of us have worked all our
lives to prepare ourselves for retirement
and put in position our drug care system.
And the federal government coming in is
likely to screw that all up."

Edward F. Coyle, executive director of the
Alliance for Retired Americans, an advocacy
group aligned with the A.F.L.-C.I.O.,
contended that "the more seniors know about
the prescription drug benefit, the more
they don't like it."

But Charles W. Jarvis, chairman of the
United Seniors Association, a conservative
group often aligned with the drug industry,
said, "Seniors want personal health choices
and tangible policy results, not endless
policy critiques and unaffordable
pie-in-the sky proposals." He said that Mr.
Bush's popularity might be "leveling," but
that it remained "extremely strong" because
"he's maintained an aggressive role on
these domestic issues."

Still, a new poll for Emily's List, a
Democratic fund-raising group, identifies
older voters as a prime area of
vulnerability for Mr. Bush, asserting that
many are driven by deep concerns about
Social Security and the cost of health
care. Geoff Garin, the pollster who
conducted the survey, said that Mr. Bush's
push for private accounts in Social
Security would only exacerbate his problems
by 2004.

Mr. Davis, the Republican Congressional
strategist, countered, "It's way too early
to figure out what will happen, except that
they will continue to be a critical vote."