Voters over age 55 are not happy according to the Chairman of RLTV and founder of the Maryland based Erickson Retirement Communities, John Erickson.

John Erickson

Erickson said on his website, JohnErickson.tv, that, “Seniors are not OK, and they’re ready for change. The Silver Tsunami that strikes next week will be tens of millions of Baby Boomer-and-older voters sending an unmistakable message: ‘I believe our country is going in the wrong direction. And I’m not going to send incumbents back to Washington to keep doing the same old thing’.”

Erickson has appeared on national television to talk about his national initiative to make sure that there is a focus on the 70 million voters aged 55 and older. Much of the election focus on voter groups has focused on the younger or first time voters.

Historically voter turnout for the 60- to 70-year-old group has been at least twice that of their 25- to 30-year-old according to Erickson. He has written and said that he thinks that the major political parties are taking the senior vote for granted, “spending too much focus on courting young souls who flock around the latest social media-powered cause.”

One day away from the election, Erikson still predicts there will be a Silver Tsunami. In a phone interview on Nov. 1 with the Toledo Free Press, he said on the Senate race between two non-incumbents, Lee Fisher and Rob Portman, that he can’t tell who will win.  ”Ohio is very close, it’s hard to say which way they are going, though the climate seems to be leaning towards a conservative trend. Voters are saying, ‘We are pulling back, we are going too far.’ I don’t think it’s a red and blue vote as much as I want change vote.”

Senior voters could be described as angry said Erickson, “They’ve received no earnings on savings accounts for four years, hit on their housing equity, social security has no increases, most people use their savings and their 401K to generate cash … There are 58 million of us on Social Security, seniors are saying, ‘This year you didn’t have enough money, but guess what guys that’s because you’ve used Social Security to run the government the past 40 years. Yes, they have this mythological trust fund, but the money is gone. The only way you are going to get the money is to take from our kids and our grandkids, that’s not the promise that you made to us’.”

Erickson said, “The great thing about the senior vote is they vote no matter what, they pay a lot more attention to individual races, they are much more involved in their communities, so they know who the US representatives are, a lot of younger people don’t know what their district even is.”

He said, “One worry I have, is that this congress may be less functional instead of more functional, you have all of the entrenched Washingtonians that can’t get displaced and all of the new people will be there. It could be cataclysmic.”

Erickson said no matter the electoral outcome that it would not start to be a real issue until after January, when those who are new and those who are re-elected take their places in Congress. He also said that is when the pressure from senior citizen groups will really be felt.

Tags: Election 2010, John Erickson, Lisa Renee Ward, Politics, Seniors

This entry was posted on Monday, November 1st, 2010 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Community, Election 2010.
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