Sixteen years since Bush v. Gore, Florida still looms as a symbolic reminder of the importance of vigilance in campaign combat.
Cue panic: the polls are particularly close in Florida right now. A New York Times Upshot poll, which was based on voter records in the same way campaigns conduct their internal polls, finds Hillary Clinton leading 41-40 in a four-way race, and tied 43-43 in a head-to-head race against Trump.
Even if it proves fleeting, the mortifying resemblance to 2000, provides a backdrop for Clinton’s increasingly warm and concerted courtship of young voters and of an increasing sense of alarm among Trump foes that millennials, through apathy or self-satisfied third-party voting, could tip the presidency into his hands.
Looking at the graph below, it seems there is quite a split between the 50-70 demographic in where their ballots will end up.
The Republican Party has thrived with boomers for decades now, but in the Trump era, when boomers are settling into retirement, political affiliations change.
One thing that’s for sure, regardless of the result of the current President election: there will be baby boomers in the White House next year. All four candidates on both Presidential tickets are members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are leading-edge boomers, born within 18 months of each other in 1946 and 1947, and Tim Kaine and Mike Pence arrived similarly tightly bunched during the high-water years, born in 1958 and 1959.
In this century alone, we have already elected baby-boomer presidents from opposite ends of their generation: George W. Bush (born in 1946) and Barack Obama (1961). Yet today the millennials have supplanted the boomers as our largest living generation. It is not difficult to imagine that in 2020, a newly elected President will promise that, as John F. Kennedy did in 1961: “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”
In the coming years, these boomers will be aging into the most powerful interest group ever assembled: the boomer elderly. They will almost certainly redefine the lifestyles and work styles of the elderly, just as they have redefined every other age group they have entered.
