Older voters look beyond Social Security, Medicare

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Get in line, Medicare and Social Security. Seniors, like just about everyone else, have money on their minds.

Who wins the trust of seniors, a group that votes at a higher rate than any other, will be a deciding factor in the presidential election. That should be good news for Mitt Romney, because those 65 and older have backed the Republican candidate in both of the last two presidential elections.

But President Barack Obama has been pounding Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, on their plan for Medicare. Those attacks are starting to bear fruit for Obama, who is gaining ground among seniors in two key battlegrounds: Florida and Ohio.

Still, Romney has the edge nationally among seniors — in no small part thanks to seniors’ concerns about Obama’s handling of the economy.

Nowhere will the senior vote be as powerful or as prominent as in Florida, where Romney and Obama are competing fiercely.

“It’s not just the cookie cutter that every senior here is totally dependent on Social Security and Medicare,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida. “As the FDR generation has passed and generational replacement has occurred, you get a more divided senior electorate.”

More seniors say the economy is extremely important to their vote than Medicare, according to a poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. A recent Associated Press-GfK poll shows 7 in 10 seniors say taxes and the federal deficit are important to them.

Even for those well into retirement, a feeble economy affects older Americans in ways you might not realize. Many have had to bail out adult children who have lost their jobs and turned to their aging parents for help. And those who lived through the Great Depression as children relate intimately to the perils of an over-indebted nation.

Just ask Dominic Santoro, an 81-year-old retiree from Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., who said it’s different for seniors than it is for younger Americans, who have years to make up what was lost during the recession.

“That’s very nice, but what about the poor senior citizen that’s no longer working and can’t replace that money?” said Santoro, who plans to vote for Romney.

But if seniors’ concerns extend beyond entitlements, those seeking the White House don’t seem to have caught on.

Obama and Ryan both hewed closely to themes of Medicare and Social Security in their speeches last week to an AARP summit in New Orleans. Ryan, who was loudly booed for vowing to repeal “Obamacare,” offered assurances that he and Romney wouldn’t alter Medicare for those in or near retirement.

“Medicare is a promise, and we will honor it,” Ryan said. “A Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare — for my mom’s generation and for my kids and yours.”

Not so, said Obama, warning seniors that Ryan and Romney want to replace Medicare with vouchers that wouldn’t keep up with health-care costs. It’s an admonition echoed in a television ad Obama’s campaign started airing last Friday in Florida, Colorado and Iowa.

Both Ryan and Romney invoked their late grandmothers in working to convince AARP members that they understand what seniors go through.

Although far from a monolithic bloc, seniors by and large have sided with Romney throughout this year’s election and favored the former Massachusetts governor 52-41 in a national AP-GfK poll in September. Though Romney has lost his edge among overall voters on handling of the economy, seniors are the holdout, preferring Romney by 10 points over Obama on that issue.

But in competitive states that could determine the election’s outcome, seniors’ attitudes are on the move. Over the past month, Obama has climbed 9 points in Florida and 4 points in Ohio, giving him an edge over Romney in both states, according to a new Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll. It’s the opposite in Pennsylvania, where Obama has lost his edge among seniors and now trails Romney 45-50.