Obama's Senior Deficit

As was noted in the LA Times poll below, Obama is only losing to McCain in the over-65 demographic.

But as I've argued plenty of times, this is McCain's peak. He's been getting a free ride, with no real criticisms of his policies yet emerging from the Democrats. Once that changes, watch out.

Matthew Yglesias agrees:

There's no telling how many McCainiac seniors will be swayed by the Obama campaign pointing out that McCain has spent years waging war on Social Security and Medicare and basically thinks everyone should get on the "marry a wealthy heiress" retirement plan, but it's going to be more than zero people. Seniors have already heard a good deal of the sort of culture war attacks on Obama that are likely to be the biggest thing driving them toward McCain, but they've heard essentially nothing of the retirement policy attacks on McCain that are likely to be the biggest thing driving them toward Obama. Consequently, Obama's senior deficit is very big. But he's winning anyway, and though he'll probably never close the senior gap he'll almost certainly narrow it.

I would go a step further. Right now there are a lot of older white Hillary voters who are so mad at Obama for beating their girl that they claim they will vote for McCain. Inevitably, most of these people will come back to the fold when Hillary bows out and endorses Obama. Once all of these fine upstanding Democrats like Bill Clinton, Hillary, Al Gore, John Edwards and the like are speaking out in favor of Obama, you will see mass consolidation of the party.

Attacks on McCain's policies will be critical. But unification of the party alone would probably be enough to put Obama over the top.