| | For some seniors, virus is shifting their views of Trump
Tommye and Rody Johnson have been registered Republicans for almost seven decades. So while the couple from Vero Beach, Florida, had some reservations about then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, they just couldn’t imagine voting for Hillary Clinton.
Now, after nearly four years of President Trump’s tweets, the impeachment scandal, and especially, what they see as his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, they can’t imagine voting for him again.
They’re not the only ones. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among voters over the age of 65 dropped 20 points between March and the end of April, making seniors more critical of the president’s performance than any other age group aside from 18- to 29-year-olds. Much of that decline seems directly related to the virus, which so far has posed a far more serious health threat to older people.
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“The people my age, we have become dispensable,” says Wendy Penk, a lifelong Republican in her 60s from Charlotte, North Carolina.
Ms. Penk, like the Johnsons, voted for Mr. Trump last time around, but is now part of a “Republicans for Biden” Facebook group. She worries about her husband’s health, and says Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic cemented her decision to vote a “straight blue” ticket in November.
“I’ve never seen this level of mishandling my entire life, and I was around during Richard Nixon and Watergate,” says Ms. Penk. “This coronavirus situation has just highlighted how inept [President Trump] is.”
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“This could have been an opportunity to unite the country,” says Mr. Johnson. “We were children in World War II, and if we had that kind of leadership today, this crisis would be a different thing.”
Ken Holmes, a Republican from the ruby-red state of Mississippi, notes that seniors aren’t expecting everything to be easy: “As adults who have been through Vietnam, and as adults with parents who have been through World War II, we know what sacrifice is,” he says. But “we need an adult in the room.”
Mr. Holmes, who works as a receptionist at a local hospital outside Jackson, recently had a friend die from the virus. He says he knows he’s not the only 2016 Trump voter souring on the president. For him, the final straw was when Mr. Trump called the coronavirus a hoax.
The crisis “has just confirmed how incompetent [President Trump] is – and how uncaring he is for others,” says Mr. Holmes. He’s planning to vote for Mr. Biden in November, the first time he’s ever voted for a Democrat, he says.
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csmonitor.com |
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