As the two oldest major-party presidential candidates in U.S. history compete for the nation’s top elected office, voters have expressed doubts about the mental competency of both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump to serve another four-year term.
But the candidates aren’t the only ones getting older. Georgia voters have been aging alongside them.
Senior citizens are the fastest-growing group of voters in Georgia, a fact that likely benefits Republicans in November, according to some political scientists, especially since the majority of senior voters in the state are white.
“When we think about populations being older and whiter, we see that as favoring Republican candidates in elections,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University. “Those voters are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.”
Political scientists estimate the preferences of different demographic groups based on their voting record in years of past elections. In the 2020 election, a higher percentage of white, senior-citizen voters reported voting for Trump than young white voters and older Black voters in Georgia, according to CNN exit polls.
This estimate relies on historical patterns, rather than recent polling, such as a June New York Times/Siena poll that found a higher percentage of seniors across the nation plan to vote for Biden. But their Georgia-specific poll in May showed that senior voters in the state preferred Trump by 20 percentage points.
Registration among seniors has reached a new peak this year in Georgia. More than 1 in 5 registered voters in Georgia are over 65 years old, and almost 1 in 10 are over 75 years old, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of the state’s voters. There are nearly 1 million new senior voters in Georgia since 2008, representing an 8 percentage point increase in their share of the state’s electorate.
They are also the age group that increased the most since the 2020 election, as younger voters aged and as new seniors registered.
For 80-year-old Pete Waugh, voting is a way to serve younger generations.
Waugh said he has voted in Georgia’s local and general elections since 2010 when he moved to the state from Florida, and he talks to his grandchildren about the importance of voting in hopes of instilling his voting habits in them.
“I’m voting for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” he said. “At age 80, I’m not voting for me anymore. I’m voting for the future of this country.”
While it is unclear exactly how many of these registrants are new to the state, L2, a political data vendor that tracks registered voters across the country, found roughly 35,000 senior voters have moved to Georgia since the 2020 election. But an even higher number of seniors may have moved to the state, since L2′s data does not include people who could not be matched to their prior registration.
These voters represent an outsized share of the electorate compared with their population statewide, which hovers around 15% in the most recent U.S. census count.
Over the past several presidential cycles, senior voters in Georgia and voters 18-29 have been similarly sized groups, but this year seniors moved ahead of the youngest voters by 3 percentage points. However, Gillespie said there is still time to register more young voters before the presidential election in November and persuade them to turn out.
Not only are more seniors eligible to vote, but seniors typically have the highest turnout in presidential elections in the state. Back in the 2020 presidential election, voters under 29 had about 190,000 more registered voters, but seniors cast almost 350,000 more ballots than them.
Jerry Pastor is an 81-year-old from Blairsville. He’s been living and voting in the state for the past 10 years, motivated by civic duty.
“My vote probably doesn’t count for much, but if everybody felt that then we wouldn’t have democracy,” he said. “It’s like my vote is helping to serve our democracy.”
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