This week at progressive state blogs: Older voters bailing from GOP; Jon Kyl as dark-money handmaid

This week at progressive state blogs is designed specifically to focus attention on the writing and analysis of people focused on their home turf. Here is the September 22 edition. Inclusion of a blog post does not necessarily indicate my agreement with—or endorsement of—its contents.

Dave Bradley at Blog for Iowa writes—Older Voters Leaving The Republican Party:

Several articles around the internet in the past weeks indicate that older Americans are finally starting to understand that the Republican Party is in no way acting in their behalf. How so many older folks ever got fooled into thinking  Republicans were ever going to work in their behalf is beyond me. Despite having attained many years of experience they were prone to believing the con job lies Republicans that are the main feature of Republican rhetoric and campaigns.

CNN postulates that older voters believed the lie that Republicans gurgled that the Obama administration was taking money from Medicare. The truth is that money from Medicare was transferred to the ACA so that costly health problems could be addressed earlier and thus not become a huge liability to Medicare as people waited to get care when Medicare kicked in.

From CNN:   

Historically, Democrats were seen as the party of seniors. President Franklin Roosevelt made Social Security one of the landmark accomplishments of the New Deal. Decades later another Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, would push health care coverage as an entitlement for the elderly and make Medicare one of the cornerstones of his Great Society program. In subsequent elections as social issues came to the fore, seniors have tended to split their votes more evenly or side with Republicans. But in 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party and the generational and societal change ushered in by the presidential election of Democrat Barack Obama, elderly voters turned decidedly towards the GOP. Republicans helped drive that process by asserting that president Obama’s 2010 signature health care reform legislation would defund Medicare. And that would be a GOP rallying cry throughout the Obama presidency.

As Republicans cemented their hold on all three branches of government plus many state houses, their long held desire to crush any and every vestige of the safety net built in the most part by Democratic administrations is no longer kept hidden from view. The most visible and popular among these safety net programs are Social Security and Medicare, the two programs that are at the very heart of older Americans ability to live and remain relatively healthy.