Disenfranchising the elderly: Republicans want fewer voters

Not necessarily. Not to generalize too much, but people in nursing homes tend to be the generation that fought Nazis.

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Well … some, for sure, but at this point they’re a bit more likely to be the generation that fought in Korea or Vietnam. WWII started over 85 years ago (83 for Americans), so a fresh-faced recruit of 18 at the start of the war would be pushing 100 or late 90s if they enlisted in the last months of the war.

Maybe their children didn’t hear enough about the atrocities? I don’t know.

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My guess is that this guy is misunderstanding the statistic that the average American spends about 6 months in a nursing home. Of course that average includes the many people that don’t spend any time in a nursing home.

At first going after eledrly voters seems strange because older Americans tend to skew towards the GOP. That is, unless you threaten to take away their Social Security and Medicare. So there’s a good chance that is on his policy agenda.

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Folks in nursing homes (as opposed to retirement homes) with only months to live are often the oldest of the old, but even their older children grew up with “fascists bad” instilled in them, which would explain Republican eagerness to disenfranchise them.

Also, people near the end of their lives may be more inclined to consider the kind of world their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit, rather than their own selfish interests.

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That can work in different ways. Both my parents (in their 80s) voted for Brexit. They didn’t think they were shafting the grandchildren, or that they themselves would be around for decades to reap the wonderful benefits.

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Also, I think there’s merit to the idea that people tend to get more small-c conservative when they have more to lose, and for the last couple of generations this has coincided with them growing old. When you have a house and a career and children, it’s understandable to try and preserve all that.

But when the people in the younger generations are feeling they don’t have a stake in the current society, because the changes in the job market and the housing market have made it so that a lot of them don’t have a career in the old sense, and can’t get enough money together to buy a house, and don’t feel secure enough to have children…

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Is it possible that nursing home residents are too old for Fox (1986)? :man_shrugging:

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While I understand the bewilderment of “but why are they disenfranchising people who are more likely to vote for them?”, I think it’s missing the point.

They’re attacking voting itself. They’re working on the low hanging fruit whatever the voting demographics, because they are on a now evident mission to reduce the total number of people with a vote to one.

It doesn’t matter who you vote for: you ain’t that one.

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The way you phrased that by putting “Wisconsin” first is misleading. He is a Republican candidate for Senator of Wisconsin, but by many accounts he’s not much of a Wisconsinite. As Senator Baldwin and others like to point out, most of his ties are to Orange County, CA, where he owns a bank and lives in a luxury home in Laguna Beach.

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/4483851-real-housewives-of-orange-county-troll-eric-hovde-over-wisconsin-senate-work-adventure/

(No, it’s not the most important reason that he needs to be defeated but it’s still fun to troII him about this.)

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Meme Reaction GIF by Robert E Blackmon

Ever since the string of losses they’ve had since 2022, members of the GOP have been speaking out against young voters under 21, expanding felony disenfranchisement, claiming women shouldn’t vote, and purging voter rolls. Seniors are just the latest group to be targeted in their general war against democracy, because they could care less about the will of the people or consent of the governed.

I hope it leads to a Blue Tsunami in November.

withstand climate change GIF by University of Alaska Fairbanks

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The thing about “you get more conservative as you get older” is that ‘conservative’ can have a broad range of meanings, from an overtly political sense to ‘less risk taking’.
For myself, I guess I believe less in ‘quick-fix’ solutions. I know from experience now what I didn’t realise as a kid. Like (for example) Trump being defeated this year won’t mean everything suddenly becomes sunshine and rainbows forever, it’s just another part of a longer slog towards a better world. As a younger person I wouldn’t have fully groked that.
So, politically I’ve not really changed much, but my attitudes towards politics have got more conservative, if that makes sense?

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But there are also people like me, who have become more left wing as they got older. Younger me was a fan of Tony Benn (someone else who got more left wing as they got older), so right wing is relative, but AnCom is much further to the left than DemSoc.

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In this country the suspicion is that Matron is filling in the postal votes in favour of the Tories. So he is rejecting votes that may be going heavily to his side.

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I wondered if this was an attempt to gerrymander districts like the ones which have a long thing finger stretched out to encompass a huge prison. The voting district is based on the population, not the number of eligible voters, so you can use this sort of clever mapping to alter the balance in your favour.

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I don’t go into many nursing homes, but I visit a number of assisted living and residential care homes, and they ALWAYS have Fox on the big tv.

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And a lot of medical offices, and car service waiting rooms, etc.

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As a Wisconsinite, no, he is absolutely is not one. (Although I guess to be fair, none of our Republicans here actually give a crap about Wisconsin.)

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The generation that fought Nazi’s has largely passed on. My father is probably the oldest of the generation that fought in 'Nam and he’s 88. Anyone who fought in WWII is close to 100. =(

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