In the primaries, too, Trump supporters were older, on average, than those of other Republican candidates. Despite the stereotype of the Trump supporter as a prime-aged working man, Trump’s campaign has actually been fueled primarily by support from the elderly.

This makes sense, doesn't it? Trump’s whole candidacy is predicated on nostalgia—not just making America great, but making it great again, returning it to an imagined, prelapsarian state of greatness. (Appropriately, Trump stole the slogan from Ronald Reagan.) More so even than most Republican candidates, Trump has run a campaign aimed squarely and frankly at old people’s nostalgia, fear of danger, and anxiety about social change.

He has also appealed directly to their desire to protect their government benefits. The need for entitlement reform is a gospel of today’s Republican Party and a hallmark of the budget plans proposed by House Speaker Paul Ryan. But while virtually the entire rest of the Republican field was promising to restore fiscal discipline by reforming Social Security and Medicare, Trump insisted the programs didn't need to be touched.

“We’re not going to hurt the people who have been paying into Social Security their whole life and then all of a sudden they’re supposed to get less,” Trump said at a Republican debate in February. It is a theme he still sounds today: At the rally in Panama City, he told the crowd that a vote for him was a “vote to put America first and protect Medicare and Social Security!”

Sarah Jane Reynolds, a 72-year-old retired administrative assistant I met in Panama City, lives on Social Security, and was powerfully drawn to Trump's message. “All these politicians saying Social Security is in trouble, that’s hogwash,” she scoffed. “It’s not a benefit, it’s our money that we paid in. Don’t tell me there ain’t no money—I don’t believe that garbage.”

Against all the modern disasters, Trump's campaign represents a rebellion of the aged—a bygone generation’s last furious gasp against modernity. “America was great in the ’60s and ’70s,” Frank Everett, a 76-year-old retired grocery manager, told me. “Now people’s gotten where they haven’t got pride.” Donna O’Brien, 69, told me, “I remember when everybody loved America. What went wrong? They took God out. It’s scary. It makes me want to cry.”

It isn’t just that Trump appeals to old people—it’s that he appeals to this particular cohort of old people, whose vision of America was shaped at a particular time. They speak of a last chance to save America, a country that will cease to exist if Trump doesn’t win.

“I grew up at a better time,” Keith Easter, a 72-year-old dentist, told me at Trump’s rally in Ocala the next day. “In the 1960s and ’70s in Rhode Island, where I grew up, you could get a job anywhere. Now you have to have a master’s degree just to cut lawns, for crying out loud.” Easter said he wasn’t voting for himself but for his descendants. “You know, we’re pretty fortunate, but our kids and grandkids are going to have a pretty difficult life,” he said. “For anybody who’s going to be alive 50 years from now, it’s going to be different.”