For today’s Democrats, unlike Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, entitlement reform is something to be opposed root and branch. The left wing of the Democratic party is even embracing an expansion of Social Security, even though the program is already on an ineluctable trajectory to be unsustainable. Underlying both stances are both principled beliefs and political calculation, the latter being that opposition to any change in Social Security will make the elderly a dependable Democratic constituency.
But that assumption is not supported by the data. Take a look at this table repaired by the Pew Research Center.
It shows the Democratic percentages among elderly (65+) and young (19-29) voters in the presidential elections from 1972-2012. For most of that period the elderly voted less heavily Democratic than the young, but the difference between the two groups varies. In the 1970s, elderly voters, all born earlier than 1912, were less Democratic than the national average. The Democrats’ moves toward dovishness and cultural liberalism were wildly out of sync with the Democratic party that many of them had supported in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1980 and 1984 there was little difference between the elderly and the young, and the elderly voted very close to the national average (41 percent for Jimmy Carter, 38 percent for Walter Mondale).
Starting in 1988 and up through 2000, the picture is different. The elderly voted more Democratic than the young and more Democratic than the national average in three of four presidential elections. The Democratic percentage among the elderly was 49 or 50 percent in each of these elections. This looks like it validates the Democrats’ perception that their perceived resistance to entitlement reform was a vote-winner. The elderly in these elections were, increasingly as the years went on, members of the G.I. generation, for whom Social Security was an especially good deal. They got back a whole lot more money than they ever paid in payroll taxes.
After 2000 the picture changes. The elderly are significantly less Democratic than the young and less Democratic than the national average in 2004, 2008 and 2012, as the G.I. generation is displaced in the over-65 cohort by the Silent generation, born in the 1930s and early 1940s. Cultural issues have played some role here: The elderly have been opposed, though by lesser margins as time went on, to same-sex marriage, an issue that splits the generations more than any other I can remember; and the small number of Americans open to voting Democratic but not for an African-American nominee is undoubtedly concentrated disproportionately among the elderly.
What’s plain is that entitlement issues — Social Security and Medicare — have not produced majorities for Democratic presidential candidates in a long time. Republican entitlement reform proposals, like those in the budgets 2012 vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan pushed through the Republican House in 2011 and 2012, didn’t deliver the elderly vote to the Democrats. Could that change as the baby boomers enter the ranks of the elderly, as they just started to do in 2012? In that year the youngest elders were born in 1947 (the same year as Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, a year later than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush). The answer is probably no: The 45-64 age cohort, made up almost entirely of baby boomers, voted just 47 percent for Barack Obama, three points more than the elderly but four points lower than the national average. This is a vivid contrast with how the boomers voted in their first presidential election, 1972, when they were 16 points more Democratic than the elderly and eight points more Democratic than the national average.
So why do the Democrats keep resisting entitlement reform? It doesn’t seem to be doing them much political good. I guess we have to fall back on what seems the unlikeliest explanation for many cynical observers: out of conviction. But some day they may ask themselves whether it’s in their political interest.
