DEMOCRATS ARE IGNORING 2018 ELDERLY VOTERS, BUT WHY? (TAX CREDIT HOUSING)

DEMOCRATS ARE IGNORING 2018 ELDERLY VOTERS, BUT WHY?

SENIOR CITIZEN VOTERS REMAIN LOYAL VOTERS.

ISSUES WHICH CONCERN SENIOR CITIZENS INCLUDING MEDICARE AND QUALITY AFFORDABLE HOUSING, ARE BEING OVERLOOKED.

TOO MANY SENIORS RESIDE IN RAGGEDY, OVER PRICED TAX CREDIT APARTMENTS MANAGED BY SLUMLORDS (MARYLAND).

IF SENIORS COMPLAIN THEY ARE THREATENED WITH BEING PLACED IN A NURSING HOME UNTIL THEY DIE.

WHERE ARE THE POLITICIANS WHO STILL CARE ABOUT SENIORS?


Post Sources: New York Magazine, The Atlantic, WTVR, Youtube


******* Elderly White Voters Are Starting to Turn on the GOP


One of the many odd features of American politics, circa 2018, is that the primary beneficiaries of our nation’s social safety net are also the core supporters of the party that wants to slash it. No age group derives a bigger benefit from our welfare state than America’s elderly; but no cohort is as susceptible to the cultural paranoia and racial resentment that sustain the modern right, either. Thus, conservatives can’t shrink “big government” without retaining the allegiance of the voters who stand to lose most from the erosion of social insurance.

The tensions inherent to this arrangement grew conspicuous during last year’s fight over Obamacare repeal — when congressional Republicans tried to pass a health-care bill that would have drastically increased the cost of health insurance for older, working-class voters in rural America (a core GOP constituency) while dramatically lowering premiums for 20-something city-dwellers (an overwhelmingly Democratic demographic). Many purple-district Republicans voted for the bill, anyway, effectively betting that it was more politically hazardous to thwart the ideological goals of their big-dollar donors, than to betray the material interests of their gray-haired voters.

This may have been costly mistake.

According to polling from Reuters/Ipsos, the percentage of college-educated white voters who say “health care” is their top issue rose from 8 percent in 2016 to 21 percent today; over that same period, the demographic went from favoring a Republican Congress by ten points, to backing a Democratic one by two.

Of course, this shift isn’t solely the product of health-care politics. While older whites with college diplomas have swung left by 12 points since 2016, those without bachelor’s degrees have remained solidly in the GOP’s camp.

If material self-interest were the only force pushing older whites out of the Republican tent, one might expect “working class” elderly whites to be leading the exodus. Nevertheless, the Ryan agenda does seem to have played a role in alienating college-educated white Republicans, whose educational backgrounds already rendered them a less-than-ideal audience for Trump’s anti-intellectual shtick. As Reuters reports:

John Camm has been a Republican since the Nixon Administration, but the 63-year-old Tucson accountant says he will likely support a Democrat for Congress in November. He is splitting with his party over access to health insurance as well as its recent overhaul of the nation’s income tax system. He also supports gun control measures that the party has rejected.

“I’m a moderate Republican, and yet my party has run away from that,” Camm said. “So give me a moderate Democrat.”

… Voters between the ages of 60 and 65 are particularly worried about healthcare, said Brigid Harrison, a political scientist at Montclair State University in New Jersey, because they are paying ever higher private health insurance premiums and are not yet eligible for Medicare.

Polling on this fall’s elections have consistently demonstrated that the Democratic base is more energized than the Republican one. In the face of this grim data, Republicans have sought consolation in the fact that core Democratic constituencies (like nonwhite and younger voters) have historically failed to turn out for midterms in high numbers.

But the Democrats’ turnout advantage in the past year’s special elections put a dent in that hope — and the leftward lurch of elderly whites all but eviscerates it. Older, college-educated whites are among the most reliable voters in the nation. And in many of this fall’s most competitive districts, such voters account for nearly 10 percent of the population, according to Reuters’ analysis. Republicans were already at risk of losing the House due to shifts in turnout patterns, alone — but if those shifts are accompanied by significant defections among reliable GOP constituencies, the party could suffer historic losses up and down the ballot.

“The real core for the Republicans is white, older white, and if they’re losing ground there, they’re going to have a tsunami,” political scientist Larry Sabato told Reuters. “If that continues to November, they’re toast.”

Remarkably, even as Republicans have lost ground with this key demographic — and Democratic candidates have won improbable special election victories while painting their Republican opponents as enemies of Medicare and Social Security — Paul Ryan has persisted in calling for sweeping cuts to entitlement spending. Meanwhile, House Republicans are preparing a symbolic vote on a “balanced budget” amendment — a gesture meant to appease die-hard fiscal conservatives, but that seems just as likely to help Democrats put a spotlight on the potential costs of the Trump tax cuts to ordinary Americans, not least those who are relying on Uncle Sam’s largesse to get them through their golden years.

CHRIS CHRISTIE: Woman Says Her Mother's Death Was Not Caused By "BRIDGEGATE" Scandal (Florence Genova)

#CHRISTIE

VILMA OLERI says "BRIDGEGATE" did Not cause the Death of her Mother Florence Genova, 91 as CNN Hosts proclaimed.

OLERI'S Mother was a Fort Lee, NJ resident & a CHRISTIE Supporter.


ARTICLE: "Woman Says Lane Closings Were Not To Blame For Her Mother’s Death"

The daughter of a 91-year-old woman from Fort Lee, N.J., who died on the day of a major traffic jam precipitated by top aides to Gov. Chris Christie said on Thursday that she did not believe the inability of an ambulance to reach her mother’s house was a factor in her death.

“I honestly believe it was just her time,” said Vilma Oleri, whose mother, Florence Genova, died on the morning of Sept. 9, the first day that the closing of local lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge set off the snarls.

A Fort Lee emergency official has said that the traffic jam prevented an ambulance from Englewood Hospital from reaching Ms. Genova’s home.

Ms. Oleri spoke inside her home in Closter, N.J. She said she had gone that morning to check on her mother, who lived alone in a two-story, red brick house on Harvard Place in the southern part of Fort Lee. Ms. Oleri said she called 911 after her mother went into the bathroom before breakfast and did not come out.
Related Coverage

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey greeted residents after leaving City Hall in Fort Lee on Thursday.
Christie Fires Aide in Bridge Scandal as U.S. Opens InquiryJAN. 9, 2014

Paul E. Favia, the emergency medical services coordinator in Fort Lee, complained in a letter to the mayor on Sept. 10 that the traffic problems caused “unnecessary delays for emergency services.”

Just before the call about Ms. Genova, Mr. Favia wrote that it took him seven minutes instead of the usual four minutes to arrive at the scene of a car crash where four people needed to be taken to the hospital.

“I, myself, was stuck in traffic on Fletcher Avenue and had to jump the curb and cut up West Street in order to avoid the standstill traffic,” he wrote.

It took a Fort Lee E.M.S. crew seven minutes to reach Ms. Genova, after they were detoured away from the traffic accident.

“The response time was only shortened by the fact that they were heading to the accident scene to assist when dispatched” to Ms. Genova, the letter says. Ms. Genova had gone into “cardiac arrest,” according to Mr. Favia’s letter.

Ms. Oleri said that Fort Lee emergency responders tried to revive her mother at her home, but that her mother showed no signs of life.

A neighbor said she watched the paramedics rush Ms. Genova onto a stretcher inside their waiting ambulance.

Mr. Favia wrote in his letter that after an ambulance with paramedics from Englewood Hospital could not get to Ms. Genova’s house, it met the Fort Lee ambulance on a street. The hospital paramedics tried again, but failed, to revive Ms. Genova. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.

“We believe she died in her home, but they couldn’t pronounce her until she got to the hospital,” said Ms. Oleri’s husband, Frank Oleri. “The traffic didn’t make any difference.”

Ms. Oleri said she had no idea until Wednesday that her mother’s death had become a source of controversy.

“We want to stay out of it,” Ms. Oleri said. “It’s not political.”

She said her mother married an immigrant from Italy and had lived in the same Fort Lee house for more than 50 years. Though her eyesight kept her from driving a car for most of the last half of her life, she insisted on keeping a car in her garage even after her husband died, because she believed it would deter burglars by signaling that a man lived there.

“She was a pip,” Mr. Oleri said.

Ms. Genova was so secretive about her age — it was one of the few details that became public when the traffic scandal gave her posthumous notoriety — that she never told her family. A decade ago, she fell and broke her hip. Ms. Oleri said her mother yanked an emergency responder’s ear to her lips and whispered her age.

“She never told me; she was like that,” Ms. Oleri said. “I sneaked a look on the paramedic’s clipboard.”

Neighbors said Ms. Genova liked to sit in her dining room with the window shade open. Occasionally, a home health aide would visit, and sit her in the sunshine on her front stoop.

“That’s how we knew she was O.K.; the blind would be up,” said Connie Ciongoli, Ms. Genova’s neighbor for more than 50 years. “We would check on her.”

Ms. Genova and her husband were married more than 50 years. She loved her son and daughter and three grandchildren, Ms. Oleri said, though in recent years her memory had began to fail her.

Because of that, she did not vote in the last election of a governor. But she did in the one before.

“She voted for Christie,” Ms. Oleri said.


Sources: AP, LinkedIn, NY Times