I’ve worked on political campaigns for close to 20 years. The first race I ever staffed was in 2006, supporting then-candidate Donna Edwards in her bid to unseat incumbent Congressman Albert Wynn. What was then a relatively novel storyline, a progressive outsider challenging an establishment insider, has since become a familiar narrative. That race, I now realize, was one of the prototypes.

Early on, I learned a hard lesson about primary electorates: the most reliable voting bloc is older voters. Our target universe was composed mainly of seniors, with some middle-aged voters mixed in. Even before the campaign officially launched, we began voter registration efforts to expand the electorate. But we never lost sight of a fundamental truth: you cannot win without persuading the voters who actually show up.

Today, I look at the progressive electoral ecosystem and see a movement that has abandoned this wisdom. Leftist and progressive campaigns have become over-reliant on the youth vote, a strategy that simply does not match turnout reality. Despite recent electoral wins by socialists and progressive candidates, these victories have often come despite the left’s failure to craft a message that resonates with seniors. Even in winning campaigns, socialist and progressive candidates tend to lose older voters while running up margins with the young. I do not believe this has to be the case.

I am well aware of the structural headwinds. Older voters consume more traditional corporate media. Many came of age during the Cold War and the Red Scare, not as history lessons, but as lived experience. But these challenges are not insurmountable. And if we can solve them, we won’t just win elections. We will dominate them.

The data is unambiguous. In the 2016 Democratic primary, Edison Research found that Bernie Sanders won 71% of voters under 30, while Hillary Clinton won just 28%. The pattern was “the inverse” among voters 65 and older. Sanders’s youth landslides were systematically erased by Clinton’s margins with seniors. And seniors vote.

The same dynamic played out in 2020. On Super Tuesday, CBS News reported that Joe Biden won 47% of voters 65 and older across all Super Tuesday states. Michael Bloomberg placed second at 16%. Sanders? Just 13%.

The age gap isn’t limited to presidential races. Data for Progress analyzed precinct-level results in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset and found that young voters, not simply gentrification, drove her victory. Their regression model, which included the average age of precinct neighborhoods, showed age was a major predictor of Ocasio-Cortez’s vote share. But the inverse is also true: where the electorate skews older, progressive candidates struggle.

More recently, AARP New York’s analysis of the 2025 New York City mayoral primary found that Zohran Mamdani’s support “skewed younger,” with a majority of his backers under 50. By contrast, 81% of Andrew Cuomo’s support, 78% of Curtis Sliwa’s support, and 78% of undecided voters were age 50 or older. The pattern holds.

Leftist candidates and a socialist governing agenda will remain handicapped if we cannot make inroads with older voters. We may console ourselves with the idea that time is on our side, that a growing, younger electorate will eventually carry our ideas to victory. But our agenda needs to win now, not in some distant future. If we cannot compete in districts and jurisdictions where older voters dominate turnout, we will lose the vast majority of races outside progressive urban strongholds.

Here’s what makes this failure so unnecessary: older voters should be primed to hear our message. The progressive agenda is tailor-made for the challenges seniors face.

Consider the evidence. The National Council on Aging, citing new Census data, reports that poverty among older adults has risen to 15%. Many seniors live on fixed incomes while housing, food, utilities, and medical costs climb relentlessly. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that Social Security lifts 17 million Americans age 65 and older above the poverty line, more than any other U.S. program. Yet a 2024 American Community Survey analysis, reported by the American Society on Aging, found that one in three households headed by someone 65 or older is housing cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of income for housing. That equals 12.8 million older households. Nearly 7 million devote more than half their income to housing costs alone.

The political establishment, whether in its right-wing Republican variant or its so-called centrist Democratic form, pays lip service to these concerns while delivering little. The left has failed to exploit this opening. We should be the party of seniors. Instead, we have ceded them to our opponents.

The solution is straightforward, but it requires intentionality. We must demonstrate that we understand seniors’ concerns by listening to them, engaging them where they are, and crafting messages that speak directly to their priorities. Our policy agenda should explicitly outline what we will do for older voters:

• Protect and expand Social Security, including higher payouts that keep pace with actual costs of living.

• Lower the tax burden on seniors, including regressive property taxes that force fixed-income homeowners out of their homes. Frame this not as a giveaway, but as a transfer funded by taxing the wealthiest individuals and corporations, as Abdul El-Sayed has done.

• Expand Medicare to cover services currently excluded, such as elder care, while making the program more accessible and easier to navigate for the seniors who already depend on it.

If we do this, older voters can become more than a voting base. They can become a volunteer base. Seniors are the backbone of establishment Democratic organizations, powering phone banks, letter-writing campaigns, and door-knocking operations across the country. Left-leaning and socialist campaigns have largely failed to replicate this. They don’t have to.

Imagine a cross-generational volunteer force: students and young workers alongside retirees and seniors, organized into a unified constituency. Retired seniors have something young volunteers often lack: time. And many have disposable income for small, mid-sized, and sometimes major contributions that can sustain grassroots fundraising operations.

To build this, we must make seniors a core constituency in our campaign messaging and our outreach strategy. We must meet them through the media they consume, in the spaces they inhabit, and with the respect they deserve.

I’ve seen this work. In my wife’s campaign, she ran as a democratic socialist, endorsed by our local DSA chapter, and won overwhelmingly with older voters in both a special election and a midterm primary. We achieved this by visiting senior centers, listening to their concerns, and talking about our solutions in a deliberate, sustained effort to win the most reliable electorate while simultaneously expanding the base. It wasn’t complicated.

I’ve seen the same success here in Prince George’s County, where progressive council candidates made senior outreach central to their campaign plans while still building the youth vote. For too long, left-wing candidates have relied on a single demographic strategy: maximize youth turnout with messaging tailored to the young. But the most consistent predictor of the gap between electoral success and defeat, across race, class, and other demographic markers, has been age. If we want to win not just in urban cores but in suburbia and rural America, we must address this deliberately.

The path forward is clear. The question is whether we have the discipline to walk it.