Can Older Americans Swing the Election for Harris?

I spent the past weekend in Atlanta, before heading off to Philadelphia and Phoenix and Reno, the final stops on an autumn-long Silver Wave Tour to turn out older voters for Kamala Harris. Third Act, the group I helped found two years ago to organize voters over the age of sixty for action on climate and democracy, now has a hundred thousand people on its e-mail list, and a lot of them are knocking on doors in swing states right now, under the auspices of our newly formed GrayPAC. And there is, I think, a serious chance that those older voters may play a crucial role in denying Donald Trump a second term.

Clearly Trump is counting on this demographic to come through for him, and with some reason. In both 2016 and 2020, the Roper Center reports, voters over sixty-five backed him fifty-two per cent to forty-five, his widest margin in any age cohort. But there are tantalizing hints it may not be so this time around—the latest Times/Siena poll shows Harris with a modest lead among elder voters. And an A.A.R.P. survey shows that women over fifty have moved more decisively toward Harris than any other group, increasing their support for the Democratic ticket by almost ten points in the course of the year, which is a huge jump in our stalemated politics. All of this jibes with what our volunteers report from retirement communities around the country—and it makes at least a little sense when you recollect that another way of saying that someone is old is to say that they came of age in a particular time.

Which explains why I spent last Sunday afternoon at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, in Atlanta. It’s downtown, right next to the aquarium and Coca-Cola World, and within sight of the College Football Hall of Fame. (Georgia knocked off No. 1 Texas on Saturday night, so a lot of Bulldog pride was on display.) The civil-rights museum is not enormous, but it is enormously affecting, especially in a simple display where you sit at a lunch counter and then (through a pair of headphones) hear a mob yelling at you to leave or be killed. It’s damned hard to last the minute and forty-five seconds that the tape runs, and I was shaking when I got up.

There’s definitely an optimistic way to look at that history, though, even as you endure the exhibits about the bombing of the Birmingham church that killed four young girls and the assassination of Dr. King, because the civil-rights movement in many ways triumphed. Near the exit of the museum, you can find photos of movement heroes who were liberated to do crucial work in the world, from Bernice Johnson Reagon, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, to John Lewis to Marian Wright Edelman to Eleanor Holmes Norton, who still serves as the non-voting delegate of the District of Columbia to the House. Last week, in Plains, Jimmy Carter cast his vote for Harris—for a white man born in Georgia farm country in 1924 to live long enough to see a Black woman nearing the Presidency is a triumph of no small degree.

But it’s a tenuous triumph, because the same Saturday night that I was rallying older Atlantans, and that, somewhat more significantly, Usher joined Harris for a massive joyfest at the Lakewood Amphitheater, Donald Trump was sounding off in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Much attention has been paid to his juvenile salute to Arnold Palmer’s anatomy, but at least as alarming was his feral declaration about Harris that “we can’t stand you, you’re a shit Vice-President,” and his decision to set up the audience so they could yell the same curse.

It’s not just that older people remember—with fondness—a time before we conducted our public life with that kind of vulgarity. It’s that we have a distinct memory of people like Trump. If you’re in your sixties or seventies now, the first act of your life occurred in that period of turmoil and liberation that included the civil-rights movement. Near the entrance to the museum, there’s a wall of powerful segregationists, all white politicians of the period. There’s Lester Maddox, once the governor of Georgia, who used to chase Black customers away from his family store with an axe handle, and George Wallace, of Alabama, and Orval Faubus, of Arkansas, who tried to keep Black children out of Little Rock schools, and Senator James Eastland, of Mississippi, who said that segregation is “the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself.” It was in Eastland’s state that the Klan disappeared James Chaney and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, three volunteers in the Freedom Summer campaign, whose photographs hang elsewhere in the museum. The senator told President Johnson that he thought their disappearance was a “publicity stunt”; two months later, the F.B.I. discovered their bodies buried in an earthen dam in Neshoba County.

Looking at those brave young men’s pictures, I immediately thought of my friend Heather Booth, who served on the board of Third Act, until she took a leave to serve as the “progressive coördinator” and seniors-engagement director for the Biden campaign, a job she has continued to hold since Harris became the nominee. I haven’t been able to talk to Heather for many months, because campaign-finance law forbids coördination between PACs and campaigns (though it seems quaint that any of us take that seriously in a moment when the Trump operative Elon Musk is handing out million-dollar checks to register swing-state voters). But I know her story by heart. In that long-ago summer of 1964, she was a student at the University of Chicago and scheduled to go South in the second wave of Freedom Summer volunteers, a few days behind the trio who disappeared in Mississippi. The news of their abduction came the night before she was supposed to get on the bus, and she did it, anyway—she was arrested that summer carrying a sign that said “Freedom Now.” I have a picture taped to my office wall of her as a young woman playing the guitar for the great civil-rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer.

I recite all this history to say that people like Booth will do everything they can to prevent the rise of someone like Trump, in part because those of us who can recall those days recognize his snarl. He’s found another group of people of color to serve as his foils—the immigrants whom he accuses of every savagery, just as the segregationists insisted that African Americans were somehow lesser beings. He speaks in the same tones, and we can hear them. We know his kind, in a way that people just a decade younger, who came of age with Ronald Reagan, may not.

Our concerns about the election are not just matters of race, of course. When Booth came back North, she founded the Jane Collective, which helped women procure abortions before Roe v. Wade made safe access to one the law of the land. We’ve lived our lives in the world of Planned Parenthood and the Clean Air Act and all the other institutions that Trump has damaged or hopes to. If older people are inherently more conservative, these are the things we want to conserve.

Despite all that, it’s a reasonable gamble that Trump can frighten older Americans into his corner—he has, after all, the services of the Fox network (median viewer age: sixty-eight) at his disposal, and their business model seems to be “terrify grandparents.” But he shouldn’t count on it, even if his appeals to a mythical America that, in his mind, used to be great are clearly aimed in our direction. Many older people are working to prove that they’re the same people who won those battles in their youth. And they’re good at it—Americans, we are discovering, will still open their door to a canvasser if that canvasser is a seventy-five-year-old woman.

So no guarantees about the outcome, except one: older people will vote in our usual huge numbers. Our civics muscle is strong after a lifetime of use. Let’s hope our sense of history remains as intact. ♦