Obama’s desire to cut Social Security looms large in midterms

Old people vote in midterms at a higher rate than young people. But until recently old people were solid Democrats. So, how did the GOP get a lock on the old people vote? Well, he is black and old people are notorious racists. (Yes, I’m looking at you Grampa Heinrich.) And the Democratic Party has recently been seen as the party of the gays, and old folks are nervous about that. But there is a much bigger reason the old folks a going R.

Republican really began getting traction among seniors during the health care fight when they attacked Democrats for cutting $700 billion from Medicare. It was one of the most repeated attacks in 2010. While it was unfair to attack Democrats for reforming the broken Medicare Advantage system, Obama made it impossible for Democrats to counter this narrative by also pushing for a “grand bargain.”

Even if Democrats didn’t really cut Medicare benefits with the Affordable Care Act, at the same time they were still pushing to actually cut Medicare and Social Security benefits with different legislation. The “we didn’t cut it yet but we want to” is a terrible response to these GOP attacks.

The Democratic party’s biggest appeal to white seniors was defending entitlements. That was their brand. You can’t be the defenders of entitlements when you are the party pushing for benefits cuts and the only party actually putting the cuts in your budget.

Once Obama took this main economic selling point from Democrats there was not much appeal left for older voters. On social issues seniors tend to be more aligned with Republicans, so Democrats can’t afford to be merely as bad as Republican on entitlements — but that is exactly what a push for a grand bargain did. By its very nature it was trying to make the parties equally bad on entitlement cuts.