I’m inclined to agree that this is a big factor: the people who turned 65 between the first poll and the second one are the first wave of baby boomers, born 1946-48. This is a HUGE group, so they’re not really comparing the same population at all.
In 10 years, the common room of every retirement home in Florida will be draped in tie-dye and reeking of “incense,” with Jimi Hendrix playing on the PA . . .
1- There are more smaller, rural states than there are big, important ones, thus more potential governorships. Look for Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to give their Republican governors the heave-ho next chance they get.
2- Same as #1, rural states tend to run red.
3- Gerrymandering, more votes were cast for Democratic reps than Republicans in 2012.
I think most senior citizens are leaving the GOP for the cold embrace of the ground.
This is part of why marijuana legalization is inevitable.
Imagine them 50 years from now, when they’re full of wrinkled old grannies named Tiffany, with sleeve tats down their saggy, wrinkled arms, tramp stamps that get exposed every time they change Depends, piercing holes that have sagged open instead of healing …
OTOH, getting Baby Boomers to *admit *that they’re old is nigh on impossible.
… collecting Kardashian memorial flatware from the Home Shopping Brain Connection…
I’m the same age I’ve always been. People around me are getting younger. 
There’s no way the shift in the over-65 population was enough to cause a fifteen point change in the poll results in two years.
Here’s a graph of voting preference vs when a person reached the (present) voting age.(here).. The cohort turning 65 is a little more favourable to the GOP then the Dems.
There’s no way the change is due to a mere two year shift in population.
Anyway’s, if the change holds up in future polling, I’d tend to attribute it to GOP attacks on entitlement spending and the shrinking salience of social issues over the last few years.
That’s my take, too. I wouldn’t put too much stock in one poll.
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Gerrymandering.
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Gerrymandering.
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Gerrymandering.
What do I win?
Because all of us older Dems that were never part of the GOP are telling them the truth about their rotten party.
You think they gerrymandered the Governor’s races?
I believe they refer to it as “voter ID”.
Wow! I thought we’d have to just wait for that generation to die off, and I was still optimistic about the future for Democrats. But if this holds up and it’s not an outlier, it is an earthquake, an immediate game changer.
“65 and over” encompasses a LOT of very different people.
The Baby Boomers are now over 60, and many are nearing 70. You can’t automatically expect a 68 year old today to have the same social and political attitudes as the 68 year olds who voted for Reagan in 1980.
Those turning 65 now are from the Viet Nam generation, they were counter-culture in the 1960’s, anti-authoritarian in nature, lived through Tricky Dick, voted in Carter suffered through Reagan, voted in Clinton, and then Gore (it didn’t stick - curious that), and Obama. So, now they are “turning away from the GOP”???
Those turning 65 now tend to vote for the GOP more then the average member of the electorate, and have done so for the last decade and a half. As you’d know if you read my previous post.
No doubt. But the poll is comparing the population now to the population two years ago, not 33 years ago.
(FWIW: the 65 year-olds today are signifigantly more GOP-friendly then those in 1980, the “Greatest Generation” was overwelmingly Democratic, and kept voting for Democrats by large margins till death kept them from going to the polling stations.)
Again: there is zero chance that the trend found by the poll is due to population shifts in the over-65 population. If the trend exits, it is because seniors are changing their minds, not because who counts as a senior is changing.
But, with people living as long as they do now, “senior citizens” includes multitudes of octagenarians and even nonagenarians. The “GI Generation” (b. 1901-1925) is mostly dead, but the “Silent Generation” (b. 1925-1942) is still alive and . . . well, not kicking much, but voting. (Getting these cohort-names and birthyear-ranges from the Strauss-Howe generational theory.) Silents grew up in the America of the “Christian consensus,” now long gone, and of Jim Crow, and more-than-occasional wedding-night virgins, and doctors who smoked while examining you, and all the rest of it. The America Stephen King calls “Atlantis.” Even Boomers (b. 1943-1960) have a world-view partially shaped by all of that. But Generation X (b. 1961-1981), the Millennials (1982-2004), and the Homeland Generation (2005-present) all see or will see things very differently.