This is Part II of On Point’s series Senior Class. Hear Part I.

Old voters dominate the ballot box in local, primary, and at times, national elections. They ensure issues like Social Security and Medicare drive the national conversation. How strong is this group’s sway on electoral politics in the U.S.?

Guests

Katharine Clark, Santa Fe County Clerk.

Paul Taylor, Former Vice President of Pew Research Center. Author of “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown” and “This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

Editor’s note: This transcript has been updated to include responses received from AARP after the episode’s original broadcast. The responses are not in the audio version of the episode which originally aired on October 6, 2026.

Part I   

PETER: I’m a retired physician currently living in, mostly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but also a home in Red Wing, Minnesota.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Peter Clark James takes his right to vote with the utmost seriousness. If he’s not in New Mexico, as you heard him, he lives between New Mexico and Minnesota, he votes absentee. During the 2020 election, Peter was in Minnesota waiting for his New Mexico mail-in ballot.

PETER: I was up in Red Wing, and I didn’t get my mail ballot from New Mexico by Friday before the Tuesday election. I drove 1,200 miles back to Santa Fe to vote in person.

CHAKRABARTI: Pati cast her first ballot in 1976. Back then, she felt like the older generation held most of the power.

PATI: When I started voting when I was 21 years old, it was the same case then. Old people went to the polls, young people didn’t.

CHAKRABARTI: Patty is one of the older generation now, and she has never forgotten the deep moral reasons that keep her going back to the polls election after election.

PATI: You voted because the vote was hard won. And then I remember as a kid growing up and watching the ’60s on TV and those people getting fire hoses turned on them and bitten by dogs and beaten by police because they were just trying to register to vote. I remember all the bombings and people who lost their lives for me to have the right to vote, and so I take it very seriously and very personally.

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and welcome to day two of our week-long series, Senior Class: Gerontocracy in America. Today, we’re talking about the silver ballot box. Now, it’s not just the baby boomer generation. Older Americans have historically voted in greater numbers than younger ones.

But as boomers in particular age, the average age of an American voter has been getting considerably older and more concentrated among seniors. And especially in primary elections, which, given political polarization, gerrymandering, and the tidal wave of money in politics, those primaries are often the deciding election for elected officials long before November.

Now, in our inaugural episode of this series yesterday, we talked about how right now, half of Americans overall are under the age of 40. That’s the median age in this country. Guess how old the median primary voter is? Now remember, you can vote starting at age 18, and if we take the average American lifespan to be about 80 years old, is the median primary voter halfway, 49 years old or 50 years old?

That would make sense if voters were evenly distributed. But that’s not the median age of a primary voter. The median age of American primary voters is much older. It is 65 years old, meaning that even though the 65-plussers are only 18% of the overall population, they are 50% of all voters. That’s what we mean by the silver ballot box.

So let’s go back to New Mexico for a few minutes because the median primary voter in the Land of Enchantment is even older, 71. This is New Mexican, Kristie Neslen. I will not vote for anyone who’s anti-choice.

KRISTIE NESLEN: I won’t vote for someone who’s that I feel would be damaging to the environment. I won’t vote for anyone that I feel like is actually trying to undermine democracy.

CHAKRABARTI: And Kristie says that as she ages, she feels greater urgency to make sure her vote counts.

NESLEN: Now I do early voting. I don’t wait till Election Day, because, you never know. You could be hit by a bus or it could be a snowstorm, so I just make sure that my vote gets in as soon as possible.

CHAKRABARTI: So we’re going to spend a few more minutes looking at how the silver ballot box has shaped New Mexico.

Katharine Clark runs elections in Santa Fe County, where she serves as county clerk, and she joins us from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Katharine Clark, welcome to On Point.

KATHARINE CLARK: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So tell me, in Santa Fe County, do you see in the flesh, so to speak, what I just described about median sort of older median voters in New Mexico?

CLARK: Yeah, so our population skews much more older retiree in Santa Fe County, even above our largest county, like Bernalillo, and our second largest county, Doña Ana County. So we see a significant portion of just our population who are older, older than 65. I think it’s above 30% are older than 65.

And then our voting population skews even older, right? We’re not seeing people who are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s voting. We’re seeing that above their 60s, folks who are voting. We’re hoping to change that. We’ve actually changed the law in New Mexico where if you are a decline-to-select voter, you can now participate in the primary without having to change your registration, and we did see that pick up more at this last primary.

As more and more people are leaving the two-party process, particularly younger voters, we’d like to see higher participation, and hopefully by changing the law, we’re going to see more participation.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Katharine, if I may, can I just clarify something? So are you saying that … because sometimes the language, the electoral language can get a little confusing. So were New Mexico primaries essentially closed or party-specific primaries? Is that what you’re saying?

CLARK: For a long time they were closed. You had to be part of a major party to vote your major party’s ballot. A few years ago we changed it that you could change your registration during same-day registration as a decline-to-select or independent voter or no party voter. But you had to change your registration when you came to the polling site and essentially caucus with either the Democrats or Republicans.

And at the time, we actually had Libertarians. Now that you don’t have to change your registration, you can just walk into a polling site or request an absentee ballot with either party, you just only can pick one. Then we’ve actually seen a pickup in participation a little bit in Santa Fe County.

We spent some time promoting it and telling people they could do that, and we’ve also seen the collapse of the Libertarian Party.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And you said that one of the specific reasons the law was changed was to attract younger voters to the polls. That’s really interesting.

Now, I love numbers, Katherine, so if you forgive me. I was looking at the median age overall in New Mexico, and it’s a hair older than the national median age. It’s closer to 40 rather than 39.5. So close enough, though. But you’re saying that in Santa Fe County in particular you have a large retiree population and that’s what skews your voters to a little bit older.

CLARK: So I understand that. But so 40 it says 38% of our county is 60 plus. So it’s quite large.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So can you tell me, other than the party affiliation question, which I’m really glad you brought up, what are the things that you think or hear from younger voters that that keep them from going to the polls?

CLARK: We hear a lot that civics or the why am I voting in the first place, is not necessarily taught in a way that’s very real. So we started a Democracy 101 program in Santa Fe County, which is very focused on youth. We started a youth advisory board in the county clerk’s office, we have experts or people who are young on our advisory board.

But Democracy 101 has a I Voted sticker contest that has a future voter and first-time voter sticker contest that we promote every year. We go into all of the high schools and middle schools, if they’ll let us, if they’ll have us, with a ballot, a voting machine, and permits, and we go through the electoral process.

It’s part of our whole effort to actually pre-bunk a lot of mis and disinformation designed to prevent young people from voting that we see on social media. We hear a lot, “Oh, both parties are the same.” We hear a lot, “Oh, my vote won’t count.” All of those are messages that discourage people from voting, and I always tell them, “Don’t be hacked. Your vote matters. Otherwise, they wouldn’t spend so much time and money telling you it doesn’t.”

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, don’t get brain hacked. Exactly.

CLARK: And that kind of contrary messaging seems to work really well, and I often encourage them that when we are talking about politicians, they look at who votes.

So even if you were to cast a blank ballot, you’re not taking yourself out of the conversation. So even if you don’t like your options, you should go into that polling site. You should request an absentee ballot, even if you have to cast a blank ballot, because they don’t know how you voted. They just know that you voted.

And they’re going to want to have a conversation with you. When you don’t vote, you remove yourself from the conversation.

CHAKRABARTI: Is write-in possible in New Mexico?

CLARK: So you actually have to, as a candidate, be a registered, qualified, write-in candidate. Okay. So if there’s a blank, sometimes we see things like Mickey Mouse, right?

Not the candidate that’s supposed to be the candidate. However, many of our races don’t have any write-in because you have to register about seven days after the regular filing day to become a write-in candidate.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay … I only have you for a couple more minutes here, and what we want to explore in the rest of the hour today is this presumption that since the median age of voters is getting older, especially in primaries across the country, and it really tilts heavily to 65 plus, that’s having an impact on the kinds of policies that are passed at the state level in particular.

Do you see from what’s happening, for example, in Santa Fe County, that they are having an impact on certain issues?

CLARK: I think people who are older are actually very concerned about legacy. Perhaps there’s sort of fights, local fights over zoning and housing.

But I do think when you talk to older voters, many of them are very concerned about the environment. Many are concerned that young people are leaving the state, that their children and their grandchildren can’t live in the communities they’ve grown up with because there’s no housing.

We actually, the governor actually pushed through legislation to have universal childcare in New Mexico, which is actually very popular. And people who are supporting universal childcare overwhelmingly are past the childbearing years, yet they recognize if you want young people to have families and to continue on your legacy or your family name, as it were, you’re going to have to attract and keep young people in New Mexico, and I do think a lot of old people are thinking about that, and who to support that is promoting policies that will keep young people in New Mexico.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. By the way folks, we actually did an entire episode speaking with New Mexico’s governor about this universal childcare plan, so go over to our website, onpointradio.org, or dig into our podcast feed to find that. It was super interesting.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: So let’s bring Paul Taylor into the conversation now. He’s the former executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, used to also report at the Washington Post and author of The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown. Paul Taylor, welcome to On Point.

PAUL TAYLOR: Good to be with you.

So how would you describe, in your own terms, the sort of shape of the voting electorate in America?

TAYLOR: As you pointed out in your earlier segment, it’s very top-heavy in terms of age. Always has been. But the additional factor in the current moment is that my generation, the giant Boomer generation, which had been massive throughout its life cycle, has now landed in the old age category.

So you not only have the phenomena, which is not new, of older adults voting at higher rates than younger adults, but now you also have our largest generation ever of older adults. So you put those two things together and you get this very lopsided electorate by age. So more lopsided than you’re saying than before because of the longevity factor.

Not only the longevity factor, but the baby boom factor. My generation, which came into life right after World War II and there was an 18 or 20-year spell where the typical woman had three children. Today, the typical woman has one and a half children. So we have been a huge generation at every step along the way.

We have had outside outsized influence on the politics and the culture at every step along the way, and even into old age, that is continuing.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So you’re getting right to what one of my fundamental questions is about the baby boomer generation. That yes, absolutely, it’s this giant demographic bubble mirrored, I should say, by the millennials, which we’ll talk about in a moment, Paul.

But when the boomers came of voting age, did they vote more than, let’s say, 18 to 40-year-olds vote now?

TAYLOR: I think a bit more. I think today’s young adults are pretty alienated from our political life. Our political and civic culture is in a pretty, pretty bad way, and it’s hard for me to imagine if I were just starting out, whether there would be anything about it that would tell me, “Hey, I ought to vote because it’s gonna make my life better.”

Just part of the reason young adults generally don’t vote at the same rates as middle-aged or older is most young adults in America today don’t yet own a home. They haven’t yet started a family. So they’re not worried about taxes as much. They’re not worried about the education system.

That’ll come later in life. So some of this is a typical life stage effect. As you get older, you can see more directly how what government does and fails to do influences you. And then when you get to be my age, you’ve got more health worries. You worry about the safety net for older adults.

But when you’re in your 20s and 30s the impact doesn’t seem quite as direct.

CHAKRABARTI: But then when you get to your 40s and 50s, you realize you probably should have voted more.

TAYLOR: Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s another factor, too, which is that today’s young adults are distrustful of institutions.

They’re distrustful of government. They’re distrustful of the media. They frankly don’t even trust other human beings. So if you don’t, if you think it’s all rigged, and we have a president who’s been saying that, but a society in some ways has been saying that in one way or another, there’s a lot of what’s the point?

It’s not going to make any difference anyway. And this is a serious, a social and civic and political problem for the country.

CHAKRABARTI: Paul, you are coming across as more sympathetic to younger voters than, I will be perfectly transparent about, than I feel. Because I’m a Gen X-er, so can’t say that I understand either Millennials, Gen Z, or Boomers, but from what my history teacher tells me, Baby Boomers had every reason, especially in the ’60s and ’70s, to also be disaffected, distrusting of government looking askance at media.

For example, we heard from a lot of Boomers when we said, “Hey, we’re going to do a show about the disproportionate power that senior voters have.” So let me just give, let them have a little bit of voice. This is 70-year-old Jim of Nebraska, and he says because of the things his generation experienced, that is what compelled them to vote, not, it didn’t make them discouraged like today’s younger voters.

JIM: I think Vietnam was obviously one of those bumps, but that generation, who are now the Boomers, and older Boomers than myself, decided maybe the answer to what they were seeing was exactly to vote, not to drop out of voting. And so they did that.

And of course, that generation, my generation, and those slightly older than I am, continued that habit.

CHAKRABARTI: So here’s also Marsha from South Dakota with a similar tone that people in her age, because of the lives they have lived, have strong context about why it’s important to vote.

MARSHA: We can remember a time when people couldn’t vote. I’m not that old, but my grandmothers couldn’t vote because they were the wrong gender. And of course, I remember the ’60s when a lot of people couldn’t vote, poll taxes, et cetera, wrong skin color, et cetera. And 18-year-old kids going off to Vietnam to get their heads blown off, but they couldn’t vote. So that’s why older people love to vote.

CHAKRABARTI: And one more. This is Joan, who’s in North Carolina. Joan turns 80 this fall, and she says that getting older has brought her closer to genuine concerns about economic precarity, and that does influence her vote.

JOAN: My parents lived through the Great Depression and rationing during World War II, which left a lasting sense of scarcity in them that permeated my upbringing. It was almost visceral, this sense that there might not be enough at any moment. I was pushed to get a good education, get a good job, and save. As a result, I managed to prosper during my long career, but when it came time to retire, I was panicked about living on a fixed income, despite having excess assets rather north of comfortable.

CHAKRABARTI: So Paul, what do you think? These are folks in your generation, you’ve told us you’re a boomer, that they actually feel like they have history within their own lifetimes that have shown them why voting and voting regularly is very important.

TAYLOR: Yeah, those thoughts resonate powerfully with me. I’m 77. I lived through the ’60s as those folks did. There was a certain, there was a lot of anger at Vietnam. There was anger that fueled the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, Gay Rights Movement. There are a lot of great things that an idealistic generation, my generation, did, and partly fueled by the fact that it understood because it saw its life impacted by government policies that it didn’t like, and it wanted to change them.

That, to my mind, is the best part of the Boomer story. But here we are now, half a century later, and the Boomers have been the most powerful electoral force in our society since then. Boomers have won eight out of the last nine presidential elections. Even today in our old age, Boomers represent I think 60 of the 100 senators in U.S. senators are Boomers.

There’s never been a generation through the course of our lifetime that has wielded this much political and economic power. Unfortunately, however, the record, and we’ve now got a half century of record suggests that we have taken care of ourselves. We are by far the wealthiest generation and the healthiest generation ever to grow old, but we haven’t taken care of posterity.

We take care of our own kids and grandkids. We’re very generous that way, but when it comes to the rest of society, other people’s kids and grandkids, we haven’t. We’ve spent on ourselves. You can see that. Two quick ways of showing that. One is the national debt. It’s $40 trillion.

These are bills that our grandkids will spend their lifetime paying off. When I came into the voting age our national debt was less than $1 trillion. So we’ve spent it on ourselves, and we’ve left the tab for future generations. The next quick point is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, far and away the crown jewels of American social policy.

Because of those programs, people my age are the least poor generation. Fewer than 10% of us are poor. Without those programs, close to 50% of us would be poor. They’re enormously important. They need to be protected. But we are now on a spending path where within the next five or seven years, they won’t be able to pay out full benefits.

They’ll have to cut back. This is a math problem, a demographic problem, that all the experts and all the politicians have seen coming for decades, but we haven’t been able to find a way to fix that, so we keep on kicking the can down the road. Eventually, there’ll be some fix. It’ll be some combination of benefit cuts and tax increases, but the more we kick it down the road, the more the burden of that fix is going to be on our children and our grandchildren.

And at some level, I think they, our children and grandchildren don’t follow all the math, but they do have a sense that their society, their government, you can say the same about climate change, hasn’t taken on the big long-term problems that they have every right to worry about.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, this is so interesting, Paul. Okay. But let me go back to something you said a moment ago when you said in terms of poverty, that only 10% of baby boomers are officially living in poverty?

TAYLOR: Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: That seemed … That’s much lower than I thought it would be, because later in this week, we’re going to talk about wealth and how the baby boomer generation is, as you said, the wealthiest generation, but just a little preview for that, which is coming tomorrow, most of that wealth is still concentrated within the top 10% of baby boomers. So we’re getting into this gray area here, where we can generalize, but if we overgeneralize, aren’t we missing another factor of baby boomers as such a large demographic? You can’t really pin everything about, let’s say, increasing conservatism on boomers.

TAYLOR: Yeah. You make a very important point. When I say the boomers are the wealthiest generation ever to get old, I don’t mean that all boomers are wealthy. Most boomers are not wealthy. But the concentration of wealth in this country, this is another thing that has happened over the last 50 years, and it has happened on the boomers’ watch, because as I’ve pointed out, the boomers have been really running the show politically.

So when I came into the workforce in the 1970s the ratio of earnings of corporate CEOs to the typical worker was about 20 to 1. Today, it’s 300 to 1. So we’re in a gilded age. We’ve been in gilded ages before in the late 19th century, in the early 20th century. When capitalism is allowed to do its thing, it tends to, the wealthy tend to find a way to take care of themselves.

That has been happening decade after decade. It’s not only the boomers’ fault, but again we’ve wielded the biggest economic and political power. So I think we’re feeling the effects of that. I think that Donald Trump this last decade has done a very good job of exploiting some of the grievances that flow from this economic inequality, although it seems to a lot of people, I think increasing numbers, that his is a government of, by, and for billionaires.

There’s a lot of populist resentment of government and its failure to reign in the excesses of capitalism. It’s been seized by the right. I suspect we’re maybe coming into an era where it’ll be seized by the left. We’ll see how that plays out, and we’ll see whether that engages the interest and attention of more young voters because right now many of them are shrugging their shoulders and saying nothing in it here for me.

CHAKRABARTI: Paul, I was going to hold my fire for a little bit later in the show, but you got me. I can’t resist. Don’t younger people have themselves, only themselves to blame? Look, it was actually Pew that a couple years ago came out with this really important moment in American history that said now millennials actually outnumber baby boomers.

Okay? And we’re not talking about teenagers or even 20-year-olds. The oldest millennial right now is 45. 45. So if voters between the age of 25 and 45 cannot motivate themselves to the polls, whereas we heard Peter from New Mexico at the top of the show saying he would drive 1,200 miles to be sure he could vote. Come on. The idea that young people are like, “There’s nothing in it for me. All the geezers are taking all the power and voting,” whereas what all they have to do is just show up at the polls. I think some self-reflection amongst younger Americans is called for.

TAYLOR: People our age, or my age, your age, have been complaining about kids today since the beginning —

CHAKRABARTI: But they’re not kids. That’s what I’m saying. They’re, like, 35 and 45 now.

TAYLOR: What is the old line when people talk about dog food and advertisements for dog food, and the advertising executives say, the problem is not the ads. The problem is the food. I don’t think, in the moment we’re in right now our political and civic life is so toxic. It’s just about people from both sides barking at each other.

Each side thinks the other is not just misguided but evil. It is a very unattractive product, to put it in those terms. I’m not, my grandchildren are not yet of voting age. But it’s hard for me to imagine, because I don’t have personal experience. But thinking of someone who’s just getting out of school, just starting out in life, it just seems to me that our political system hasn’t put its best foot forward in quite some time.

CHAKRABARTI: But you know what the youngs say. Be the change you wanna see in the world. But Paul,I’m gonna drive this home just a little bit more. I’m looking at the recent census data, and it shows that the baby boomer generation, currently there’s about 66 million boomers in America.

Gen Z and millennials combined are 148 million. So 20% of the population is boomers, and more than 40% of the population  are millennial and Gen Z. So again I’m seeing this disconnect between the criticism that’s given to the silver ballot box, as we’re talking, versus the quite simple solution.

TAYLOR: Yeah, listen, one birth and one death at a time that solution is going to take hold.

The generational torch is going to pass, and one of the interesting things, we haven’t talked about it, about the moment we’re in, is there is a ideological and racial gap between today’s older adults and younger adults. It’s never been as large as it is right now. So to generalize broadly, most older adults are white and conservative and most younger adults are non-white and liberal. Now that hasn’t fully asserted itself because of differential turnout rates, but that is gonna start to show up perhaps in a month from now, perhaps two years from now, but certainly on down the line. So change is coming. There is no doubt about it.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI:  It’s not just that seniors vote more than others. They also organize. And I guarantee you’ve heard of their most prominent lobbying group

(AARP AD)

Voice 1: “Right now is the perfect time for you to join AARP.”

Voice 2: “AARP offers a lot, but I’m not retired.”

Voice 1: “Oh, you don’t have to be retired to join AARP.”

CHAKRABARTI: With approximately 40 million dues paying members, AARP is the second largest member organization in the country, only AAA is larger.

AARP represents any American over the age of 50. Those dues paying members are part of an advocacy behemoth. AARP has a $2 billion budget. More than 1 in five voters in national elections is a member.

NOVELLI: My attitude is, if we didn’t have AARP, we’d have to invent it.

CHAKRABARTI: Bill Novelli was the CEO of AARP from 2001 to 2009.

NOVELLI: People join because they do believe in the advocacy. They join because of endorsing products and services. They have a great magazine. A good newspaper. But I think that voice is very important.

CHAKRABARTI: And incredibly influential. And not just on Capitol Hill. AARP is a cultural and market force. Especially that magazine.

ROB COSTA, CBS NEWS: “How did you get Bob Dylan to be on the cover?”

MYRNA BLYTH: “He called us! And asked us!”

COSTA: “He called you?”

BYLTH: “Yes.”

COSTA: “Dylan doesn’t call anybody.”

BLYTH: “He called the editor.”

CHAKRABARTI: That was then-AARP magazine editorial director, 87 year old Myrna Blyth, flexing for CBS News last year.

CHAKRABARTI: AARP was formed in 1958 by Ethel Percy Andrus. She was a pioneering retired school principal, the first woman to ever hold that position in California, and a tireless advocate for teacher retirees.

ETHEL PERCY ANDRUS: We’re all growing old at the same rate. And it’s rather comforting to know that time just can’t be managed.

CHAKRABARTI: She’d founded a national retired teachers organization and was seeking an insurer to provide group coverage for her members. 42 insurers refused. And then, Andrus found New York insurance agent Leonard Davis. Together, they piloted an insurance program. It was wildly successful, which then led Andrus and Davis to co-found AARP.

Davis then created the Colonial Penn insurance company, which had an exclusive relationship selling insurance to AARP members until 1978 … when the irascible Andy Rooney of CBS’s 60 Minutes suggested that AARP was just a vehicle to sell insurance to the elderly. AARP ended the exclusive agreement after that.

But insurance sales are still at the core of AARP’s business.

2009 AARP AD: Medicare, it doesn’t cover everything. That’s why you should consider an AARP Medicare supplemental insurance plan, insured by United Healthcare Insurance company. It can help cover some of what Medicare doesn’t.

CHAKRABARTI: For about 30 years, United Healthcare Group has been AARP’s co-branded choice for supplemental insurance.

According to AARP’s 2024 audited financial report, the group made $289 million in membership dues, and more than $1.2 billion in what it calls “royalties” — AKA insurance company kickbacks, most of which is tax-exempt due to AARP’s status as a non-profit.

In 1995, Senator Alan Simpson had had enough. The Wyoming Republican was chairman of a Senate Finance subcommittee. He launched an investigation into AARP’s structure and operations.

SEN. SIMPSON: People know that something is wrong when an organization that gets more than half its income from commercial business activities, simultaneously spends millions annually to lobby with the claim that they represent the interests of seniors, and the elderly.

Sarah Lovenheim, current Vice President of External Relations at AARP told On Point in a statement following broadcast that “companies providing member services and benefits have no input into AARP policymaking.” Lovenheim added that AARP’s advocacy work is “entirely separate from the taxable subsidiary” that sells insurance to members.

CHAKRABARTI: Simpson wanted to revoke AARP’s tax-exempt status. He knew it was risky.

SEN. SIMPSON: And that no one would dare to attack America’s most powerful and sympathy invoking voter group.

CHAKRABARTI: He joked that he had to grow a “second epidermis” to deal with the blowback. He was getting so much mail from seniors, his office resorted to weighing it.

However, Simpson’s efforts failed. AARP still has its status as a tax-exempt social welfare organization.

This might seem a departure from our focus on AARP’s lobbying might, but it’s also central to a fundamental bind AARP finds itself in as a true advocate for all American seniors, rich and poor. That bind: Can you be an effective political advocate for the most economically vulnerable seniors when your business and membership model is so closely tied with keeping insurance companies and the richest seniors happy?

“Our track record speaks for itself,” Sarah Lovenheim, AARP vice president of external relations, told us after broadcast. “[AARP is] one of the most effective advocacy organizations in America.”

Lovenheim pointed to a number AARP-supported federal and state policies, including preserving Social Security and auto-IRA programs in 22 states which allow low-wage workers to set aside money for retirement if their employers don’t offer a plan.

NOVELLI: I think that’s the way you have to be. Go down the middle. Be practical. Be pragmatic. Appeal to both sides. And today it’s harder than it’s been in the past.

Again, Bill Novelli, former AARP CEO.

NOVELLI:  I used to have a plaque in my office and it had two quotes. One quote was Trent Lott, who was the Senate Majority Leader at one time. And he used to say, “AARP is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.” And the other quote was Pete Stark, who was a, a liberal Democrat from California, and he would say, “What does AARP stand for? Always advocating for the Republican Party.” So, there you had it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yale University professor Samuel Moyn calls this a cage of AARP’s own making. A “conservative sclerosis” that pushes AARP towards spending tens of millions of lobbying dollars advocating for the status quo, not progress.

Bill Novelli disagrees. Back in 2003, he was running AARP when the group played an instrumental role lobbying for President George W. Bush’s sweeping Medicare reform package, which led to expanded drug coverage with the creation of Medicare Part D.

NOVELLI: “We did a great job getting prescription drugs into Medicare. One party didn’t like that.

CHAKRABARTI: That would be the Democrats. They felt the initial proposal was a handout to Big Pharma, because it allowed price negotiations between HMOs and pharmaceutical companies, essentially boxing out the federal government which would eventually foot the bill. As a consequence, AARP lost 45,000 members. Novelli says it gained them all back.

AARP’s Lovenheim disputed this number after broadcast. She said it does not match AARP’s internal figures. She could not offer another number, saying the organization typically does not publicly share that information.

NOVELLI: And you have to do what’s necessary, what’s right, and it’ll work out in the future.

CHAKRABARTI: And that is good for America’s present and future seniors. But that latter group is children and young people now.

Approximately 37% of the entire federal budget goes towards Social Security and Medicare. Following broadcast, AARP’s Lovenheim said, “Older adults paid into these programs for decades before seeing any of these benefits.”

And, thanks, in part, to AARP America’s young get a fraction of support from the federal government that their grandparents receive. For every dollar the government spends on children, it spends $6 on senior benefits.

That’s a criticism of gerontocracy that Bill Novelli doesn’t buy. He says, supporting seniors now is a way of safeguarding the future.

NOVELLI: Alan Simpson used to call them greedy geezers. But I think older people have a strong sense of legacy, are much more culturally oriented and believe in society. I’m a believer in the broader good, the greater good.

CHAKRABARTI: And full disclosure, AARP is an underwriter of WBUR.

CHAKRABARTI: Paul Taylor is with us. He’s author of The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, and he’s former executive vice president of the Pew Research Center. So Paul, your take not just on the silver ballot box, but the silver lobby.

TAYLOR: Listen, AARP does a great job of looking after the interests of today’s seniors. I think they have done a very poor job of looking after the interests of tomorrow’s seniors, and that is a much bigger social and political problem. You can run the numbers. You mentioned the skew in government spending.

We talked earlier about the fact that the older Americans today are the least likely age group to be poor. When I came of age, older Americans were the most likely age group to be poor. It is a triumph of social policy that we have addressed those concerns for elderly adults.

You can go all the way back to Social Security. You can then go to Medicare under LBJ. And AARP has preserved those magnificent programs. But again, it is not complicated to see that the math will not work. We now have a large cohort of older adults and a smaller cohort of younger adults in terms of its relation to the overall population.

The way these programs works, they were set up by Franklin Roosevelt. It’s a long story, but they were set up by Franklin Roosevelt to seem like you were investing in your own pension by the way it was taken out, and it’s your money, and the government then gives it back to you when you get old.

That’s really not the way the program works. The program works that today’s workers pay for the benefits of today’s retirees. And as you have more retirees and fewer workers, that is a big math problem. And the fact that Democrats and Republicans alike haven’t been able to find a common ground solution is robbing the economic wellbeing of our children and grandchildren.

CHAKRABARTI: They haven’t been able to find a common ground solution because of the very voters we’re talking about this hour, because the bipartisan unwillingness to find some kind of fair but long-lasting means of shoring up Social Security and Medicare is pretty constant.

TAYLOR: You’re absolutely right.

So they fear the wrath of the baby boomers of today’s elderly, which as we’ve been discussing, vote in very high numbers and they’re a large cohort to begin with. So it’s a feedback loop. You’re absolutely right, and it would take, the last time that we as a political society made some effort to address these demographic challenges was way back in 1983 when two sort of World War II era warriors Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, set aside their political differences and realized it’s not working.

Let’s jump off a cliff together. Let’s take the bullets from our voters who won’t like this, and let’s fix the program for the foreseeable future so we won’t have this cliff that we’re about to go over. That was more than 40 years ago. The cliff is here again, and we see nowhere on either side of the partisan aisle a willingness to make the hard choices.

That is a failure. And I go back to the particular characteristics of the baby boom generation. We’re all over the map politically. We’re liberal, we’re conservative, we’re moderate, but there are certain traits that we have exhibited since our youth.

We’re pretty self-righteous. We think we know best whether conservative or liberal and we’re pretty uncompromising. And a country like ours, as heterogeneous as it is, it needs political leaders who can find their way into the middle. And I think that has been a generational failure of the boomers.

CHAKRABARTI: As a sardonic Gen X-er, Paul, I’m gonna say that the way you describe Boomers sounds a lot like your own kids, the millennials. But okay, I’m gonna put that joking aside and also I want to talk a little bit more about, okay, so there’s the actual act of casting ballots, which is a way of having your say in this democracy and how boomers are doing that in spades.

But then I want to talk a little bit also of more about the other giant force in American politics, and that is money. Because I’m looking here at some numbers. These are from Samuel Moyn’s book Gerontocracy in America, and he cites some numbers about who are the richest donors in elections. And so he has some numbers here that in the 2014 cycle, and this is according to Open Secrets the group that tracks campaign finances, and they said, and he says in 2014, the average age of about 500 age-identifiable donors who were the most generous, okay, the most generous in federal elections, the average age was 65.6 years old.

The most common age was 70. So it’s not just voting and it’s not just AARP as a lobby, it’s even in the form of direct donations.

TAYLOR: Absolutely. Again, we are in a gilded age and the old have gotten richer and the rich have gotten older. And so you see it in absolutely those numbers.

And what is gonna weigh to fight our way to a more equitable distribution of economic and political power? I think as you’ve talked about, it is an engagement by those who are younger and middle-aged and recognize it’s in their self-interest to turn things around. I believe in cycles of history.

I think previous gilded ages eventually reach a tipping point and the public reacts. I think we’re near that tipping point now. I don’t know how it’s going to play out, when it’s going to play out, but things are going to change.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So but tell me more. It seems like right now, Paul, your overall assessment is, especially in light of Social Security, Medicare, and the federal, the national debt, that you’re arguing against the political influence of your own generation. And what about all those people who right now, also of your generation, are yelling at their phones or their radios, however they’re listening, and saying, “But what about all the other advances that have come with the voting of the baby boomer generation?”

You can’t just discard those.

TAYLOR: Oh, not at all. Not at all. And to me, this is part of what I would call the tragedy of my generation, but there’s a lot on the plus side. And again, if you go back to some of the folks you quoted earlier in this hour, listen, we came of age at a time when if you were a woman, if you were a person of color, if you were gay, the doors were closed.

And that took a lot of work and a lot of activism to change hearts, to change minds, to change laws. It wasn’t the boomers only who did that, but the boomers had a very important role. That is a proud legacy of my generation. So I would absolutely balance that against my feeling that over the course of our lifetimes we’ve done too much of taking care of ourselves and too little worrying about future generations.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so we have about 30 seconds left, Paul. I want to circle back to where we began because I think for a lot of people they’re still like, older people always voted more. But you are saying that historically we’re at a different point in America now. So the impact of older voters is likely to last a lot longer.

TAYLOR: Again, it’s the pig in the python. It’s this massive age bubble that has worked its way through, all the way through, and here we now, are now parked at the upper end. And even though our numbers are not as great now as the millennials, our voting influence is going to be around for a little while. Not forever, but we got some kick left.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.