How will America's older voters vote?

How will America's older voters vote in the 2016 elections?

At first glance, recent trends suggest the statement sometimes attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, the masterful 19th-century British politician and writer, is spot on: "A man who is not a liberal at 16 has no heart. A man who is not a conservative at 60 has no head."

But the truth is a little more complicated than that. It's a mistake to assume that boomers (now 52 to 70) and older Gen Xers (36 to 51) will mostly vote Republican because of their age.

"Chronological age is just a cover variable that obliterates the great variation among people in the second half of life," said Ursula Staudinger, a Columbia University professor of sociomedical sciences and psychology and founding director of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center.

It's true that over the past two decades, older Americans have moved from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican in presidential elections. (At the same time, younger, increasingly diverse American voters have leaned Democratic.)

So you might think that if past is prologue, the aging of the mostly white baby boom generation would be a voting booth boon to Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump in his election fight with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

What's more, a strand of recent commentary maintains that today's older voters are risk-averse and nostalgic for an earlier era, which would tend to favor Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign tagline. This stereotype gained credence following Britain's pensioners voting in large numbers to leave the European Union in the Brexit vote, while the younger generation overwhelmingly preferred staying in the E.U.

But, I believe, the demographic divide isn't a straight-line extrapolation from age group to voting booth.

For one thing, there's a pretty big difference between the way older boomers (mostly late 50s and 60s) and younger boomers (now in their early to mid-50s) vote.

Older boomers, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, have consistently leaned more Democratic than younger ones, who came of voting age in the 1970s and early 1980s, according to the Pew Research Center. Conversely, in the generation right behind the boomers — Gen X — older members skew Republican, while younger ones lean Democrat.

I'm also skeptical about the risk-adverse elder stereotype.

There's been a rise in the labor force participation rate among older workers, and scholarly studies on investment behavior find a greater willingness to take risks among older income-earning Americans than their peers living on fixed incomes. And, these days, older Americans are much more willing to start a business than the younger generation, a pretty high-risk proposition.

So far, at least, the issues of Social Security and Medicare aren't a playing a major role.

Now, if you read the party platforms, you'd understandably think the classic Democrat vs. Republican fight over the future of Social Security and Medicare would dominate in the jockeying for senior votes.

Democrats, who typically push to protect Social Security and Medicare benefits, are once again rallying around defending and expanding these programs. Their platform vows to "fight every effort to cut, privatize, or weaken Social Security," proposes to "expand Social Security so that every American can retire with dignity and respect" and asks "those at the top to pay more" into the system.

Republicans, who since the 1990s have viewed Medicare and Social Security as unaffordable without drastic reforms, offer a version of Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan's austerity vision in their platform, after exempting Americans 55 and older.

The platform calls for raising Medicare's eligibility age, opposes raising taxes to shore up Social Security and calls for tapping into the "power of markets to create wealth and to help secure the future of our Social Security system." (In other words, privatize or partly privatize Social Security.)

Trump likes Social Security and Medicare the way they are. Throughout the primaries, he rejected the perspective that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare.

"Donald Trump has been unequivocal in his support for Social Security and Medicare," said Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. "Trump has been upfront about defending Social Security and Medicare. That makes it much harder for Democrats to scare seniors that Trump is going to take away their benefits."

I think the critical factor for undecided or wavering older voters will be intergenerational equity.

Based on my travels around the country talking with boomers about my book, "Unretirement," they care deeply about the younger generation. The candidate who has outlined a set of economic and social policies raising the odds that the next generation will do better than their aging boomer parents may well attract the undecided older voters.

See you in November.