Gray Vote No Longer Reliably Red

"It wasn't a sacrifice," Decker says. "We had a game plan to spend our retirement together."

But the game plan for many of the couple's friends at Sun City Center has been jeopardized by the financial meltdown. Decker hears the stories in the wood shop. Guys who took their company's advice and converted their pensions to 401(k) plans only to watch their holdings diminish by half when the market plunged. Jeannie tells him that some of the women are skipping their weekly trips to the beauty parlor and letting their hair go gray. More people their age are bagging groceries at the nearby Publix supermarket, and foreclosure signs, once unthinkable, are popping up in the trim Bermuda grass.

"I still believe in our country," Decker says. "But Jeannie and I don't have time to rebound. When you are 72 and 73, you don't have time to recoup."

'A Nice Legacy for Our Kids?'

The storefronts at the strip plazas serving Sun City Center say it all: pulmonary clinics, laser surgery, Beltone hearing aids, oxygen tank rentals, a Bob Evans and numerous pharmacies. Retirees zip around in golf carts, many of them outlandishly customized, including one that looks like a giant sombrero, complete with fringe. But spare these folks the Florida retiree jokes -- they've heard them all. Giving a tour of the aquatic facility, information director John Bowker mentions that four seniors have died in the Jacuzzi. "The most common sound around here is an ambulance," he says.

Once a solid hub of conservative retirees from the Midwest, Sun City Center has in recent years been set upon by newcomers who make for a less cohesive voting group -- "liberal Northeasterners," says Dee Williams, president of the Sun City Center Republican Club since 1991. In other words, blue-staters.

The influx of Democrats and McCain's tepid style of campaigning have Williams concerned enough to shoot off SOS e-mails to the Florida Republican Party warning that her turf cannot be taken for granted. "McCain is not bringing passion," says Williams, 80, sitting in her living room of blue sofas. "He has to convey to the public that what we are doing with the bailout, we had to do."

In her Missouri twang, Williams makes a direct appeal to her candidate: "You better get off your duff and show some fire. Send Sarah [Palin] and her husband to Michigan. If you are going to give up Michigan and you lose Florida, you lose."

The same morning Jerry Decker and the Sawdust Engineers are tinkering in their wood shop, a group of women called the Weavers are at their looms elsewhere in the activities center expressing ambivalence about McCain.

"He's flat, he's old, he doesn't seem enthused," says Jane Bolder, 69, a registered independent who twice voted for Bush because of his tax policies. Voting for McCain, she says, would be a no-brainer if he had picked Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman as a running mate instead of Alaska's Gov. Palin. "I can't imagine sending Palin, with her cliches, et cetera, to negotiate or meet with leaders of other countries," she says.

Obama has struggled to capture older white voters, and Bolder epitomizes their hesitance about him. "He has pizazz, but he has a lot of plans to spend a lot of money," she says. "The health plan is more geared toward government control. He wants to raise capital gains taxes. Where is the money going to come from to pay for health care?"

Outside, the aqua aerobics class is full tilt with women in water wings dancing to Abba's "Mamma Mia" while golf carts are nosed up to the state-of-the-art gym. The computer room is packed. Bridge starts at 2. To write off this population as a monolithic voting bloc is a mistake: Ages here range from 55 (known as the "babies") to 95. They TiVo, they download, and most important, they are inveterate consumers of information.

The one common experience that sears the majority here is the Great Depression. The tanked economy has transcended their usual single-issue focus on health care or Social Security. They are worried, even mournful, about the country that is being passed on to their children and grandchildren. The surface anger is directed at reckless corporations and lack of oversight, but the deeper emotions eventually come out.