An Aging Electorate Will Play a Big Role in Deciding Some of 2026’s Biggest Races

Jordan Wood has been campaigning throughout Maine, first as a Senate candidate and now to succeed Rep. Jared Golden. At every town hall, the crowd has mostly been people over the age of 60, he said.

Maine has the oldest electorate in the country. It’s also home to one of the highest-profile races of the 2026 midterms.

“I feel pretty confident in saying I believe that it is the most important demographic in this election in determining the outcome, especially in the midterms,” Wood said of his race.

Older, white, educated voters, the demographic that makes up a large swath of Maine’s electorate, is a group that has consistently moved away from President Donald Trump each election.

They are “the most important voting bloc in Maine,” Wood said.

In addition to Maine, two competitive North Carolina districts are also home to a sizable number of retirees. Twenty percent of the population in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, which gained most of the state’s coast, is ages 65 and over. Twenty-five percent of the population of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is ages 65 and over. Maine and North Carolina also have two of the most competitive senate races of the cycle.

Reaching retirees is going to be “critical” for the midterms, said Matt Mercer, the North Carolina Republican Party’s communications director.

Seniors are already shaping how the parties are thinking about campaigning as they begin to craft their platforms for the midterms.

Issues like Social Security, health care and even child care — for those who are taking care of their grandchildren due to rising child care costs — will play big roles in the major races of 2026, party operatives and candidates told NOTUS.

“We have to sell an economic vision that appeals to both someone beginning their career and also ending their career,” said Grayson Barnette, campaign manager for Jamie Ager, who is running to oust Republican incumbent Rep. Chuck Edwards in North Carolina’s 11th District.

A part of this messaging war is playing out around the president’s budget law, which made deep cuts to Medicaid that’s expected to hit rural hospitals hard.

It’s something Democrats are campaigning on and Republicans are having to answer for.

“We’re going to drastically see the fact that people are going to watch their cost of living go up under this administration. And that’s something I think that we have got to hammer home over and over and over again,” said Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party.

When Republican Paul LePage was governor, he vetoed Medicaid expansion several times because the Maine Legislature would not fund the state’s share of the expansion.

Now, LePage is running in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. His campaign manager, Brent Littlefield, says the former governor will emphasize his support for funding rural hospitals.

“We do think that will be a concern for people. It’s an important issue, and I think that Gov. LePage has shown repeatedly that he understands the need to support rural hospitals and health care,” Littlefield said.

Republicans are trying to play Trump’s budget law to their advantage with seniors. In North Carolina, Mercer pointed to the $50 billion fund, which will be rolled out over five years, for rural hospitals that’s in the law. The provision was included in last-minute negotiations to win over Republican senators that were concerned about cuts to Medicaid. The Trump administration this fall opened an application period for those funds, including an incentive structure for states that passed Trump-favored policies.

Mercer said Republicans will also need to message on the law’s provision allowing most seniors to not pay taxes on their Social Security benefits.

Democrats have their own message on Social Security: That the Trump administration disrupted operations through its DOGE initiative, and that Republicans have backed privatizing the program.

Wood supports eliminating the income map to produce more revenue for the program, and Matt Dunlap, another Democrat running in Maine’s 2nd District, said he would support removing caps for insurance contributions from wealthy people to help make the program more solvent.

Wood also pointed to child care as an important issue for seniors because many of them serve as caregivers for their grandchildren due to the high costs of child care centers. He supports a universal child care program that would cap costs at $10 a day per child.

Seniors’ politics are not monolithic. In North Carolina, older voters trend conservative, particularly on social issues, said Chris Cooper, an elections watcher and political science professor in North Carolina.

To appeal to those voters, Cooper said that Rep. Don Davis, whose seat was made more conservative in the recent redistricting, and Ager should style themselves as more moderate Democrats who are issues-focused.

“What Ager or any Democratic nominee has got to do is to position themselves as an ‘old school mountain Democrat’ and try to separate themselves from the Mamdani brand and the AOC brand,” Cooper said.

Ager calls himself a mountain Democrat, “someone who puts their community over their party and understands that there are issues where we all agree about 90%, and we’re willing to talk about the 90% and not embrace the 10% that divides us,” Barnette said.

To appeal to conservative voters, Davis said he plans to be a “different Democrat,” who is “dependable and pragmatic.”

“Apparently the Democratic tent is big,” he said. “I probably tend to lean more on being definitely more center-right. I’m definitely more open-minded.”

What is true across the board is that older people are more likely to vote and are more likely to be registered with a party.

“Among our most committed voters are older Americans in the state of Maine,” Dunlap said. “They mark it on their calendar. They would walk through a 7-foot snow drift to get to the polls on Election Day.”