PBS Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

The debate moved onto senior citizens for a little bit. A lot of the focus of this campaign has been on Clinton’s problem with young voters. Sanders, though, has a problem with older voters. He lost them by 11 percentage points in New Hampshire, despite winning statewide by over 20 percentage points. In Iowa, he lost them by 43 percentage points even he basically tied the state with Clinton

Officially, 4.6 million American seniors were living in poverty in 2014; the senior poverty rate was 10 percent, lower than the 14.8 percent figure for Americans as a whole. But those numbers understate the level of poverty among seniors. The official definition of poverty is decades old and underestimates the cost of health care and other major expenses for seniors. Under an alternative definition of poverty that most economists consider superior, the poverty rate for seniors was 14.4 percent in 2014.