Yes baby boomers, it’s official: you’re getting really old. This year, America’s first boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – are reaching the age of 80.

Once subscribing to the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” this giant cohort numbering 79 million at its peak and still above 66 million, has made a huge, distinct impact on many aspects of the nation’s social, cultural and economic life. During their younger years, boomers advanced the causes of civil rights and women’s equality, setting the stage for broader shifts among later generations. They have affected the business world and popular culture in ways that still endure, and have installed four presidents in the White House, each serving two terms.

This seems an opportune time, then, to look back to understand how they compare to the generations before and after them, as well as how their influence may change in the coming years.

Baby Boomers Will Soon Dominate the Oldest Old

Boomers were born in an America that had finally shaken free of the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II. And as they age, what started as a rivulet will become a flood: thanks to the boomers, the nation’s 80-plus population group is projected to double, from 14.7 million in 2025 to 29.4 million in 2045.

Often likened to iconic novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “pig in the python,” the baby boomer generation created its demographic power by sustaining exceptionally high numbers of births for the 19 years following World War II – presumably a product of postwar prosperity and the fervent embrace of family life in the wake of wartime dislocation. Because the boom followed more than a decade of low fertility, the boomer generation continued to increase the size of the age groups it entered. And because the fertility explosion was followed by more modest birth numbers in the Gen X cohort, the body of the metaphoric python shrank behind them.

Over the 2025-35 decade there will be a striking rise in the population group aged 71 to 89 as baby boomers age in. At the same time, there will be a corresponding decline in the population aged 55 to 70, as the baby boomer generation departs. The figure below also shows positive shifts in 2035 for the 39- to-54 age group (gains associated with the somewhat larger millennial generation); more modest gains for the 27-to-38 age group (the older part of Gen Z); and declines for the under-26 age group. Overall, though, the biggest positive changes occur for those age groups the baby boomer generation is entering, reflecting the pig-in-the-python at work.

In fact, over the next 20 years, this dynamic is guaranteed to make the nation’s “old” population even older. In 2025, nearly half of the age 60-plus population had not yet reached age 70. By 2045, this share will shrink to 39 percent. Over those same 20 years, the share of people over age 60 who have reached age 80 will top 29 percent, compared with just 17 percent in 2025. And as boomers inflate the size of the “older old” senior population, their problems are sure to become yours. They may be the healthiest elderly ever, but disproportionate numbers will have chronic health conditions that require expensive care.

The demographic reality is locked in: over this time, the U.S. population will continue to age. The nation’s youth population showed an absolute decline in numbers between the 2010 and 2020 census – a decline projected to continue into the foreseeable future. This will lead to a shift from what demographers term a “youth dependent” population to an “age dependent” population – that is, a shift in whose dependence will weigh most heavily on the working-age population. While the 65- plus population is typically thought of as the group that is of retirement age and therefore dependent on those working, one might speculate that as baby boomers stay relatively healthy and choose to work longer, it’s the 70- plus population that will comprise the new “senior dependent” population.

Even with this assumption, census projections show that in the year 2034 the nation’s 70-plus population will exceed the size of the under-15 population, making boomer seniors a central focus of the next decade’s senior dependent population. Moreover, likely declines in the younger working-age population – particularly declines among those working in health care – will make caring for older seniors ever more of a challenge.

Baby Boomers are More Racially Diverse and Better Educated

Boomers bring something different to the table in terms of demographics as they move into senior-hood, just as they did at younger ages. Two important ways boomers differ from prior senior generations are their racial/ethnic diversity and their level of education.

Boomers as seniors are already more racially diverse than their predecessors. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, in 2025 the boomer generation as a whole was 71 percent white, 11 percent Latino/ Hispanic, 11 percent Black and 6 percent Asian American. This is quite a shift from the previous generation, which at the same age in 2005 was 80 percent white, 7 percent Latino/ Hispanic, 9 percent Black and 3 percent Asian American. The larger minority population of baby boomers today reflects growing up in years that saw large immigrant populations augmenting the native-born boomer cohort.

This is made even more apparent in the projections displayed on page 42, which show that by the time all surviving boomers are over 80 (which will be in 2045), the total 80-plus population will be more diverse (30 percent nonwhite) than it was in 2025, before boomers started joining the octogenarian set.

This will incentivize government and private sector programs caring for seniors to broaden their focus to the needs of individuals from different backgrounds, languages and family networks, blazing the trail to accommodate even more racially diverse future generations when they reach their senior ages.

Then there’s the impact of education. The baby boomers benefited greatly from post-World War II programs in the 1950s and 1960s that raised the quality of public schools, as well as federal government programs such as the Higher Education Act of 1965 that enabled them to attend college in historic numbers at a reasonable cost.

The impact of the boomers on the average education levels of seniors can be seen in the figure on the next page, which displays the education attainment of seniors age 70 to 79 for both early and late silent generation adults (in 2005 and 2015, respectively) along with those of early baby boomers in 2025. The charts on page 41 show men and women separately, with both groups showing great progress raising shares of post-high school education.

The rise in educational attainment among women is especially striking, though they didn’t catch up to men. When they were between 70 and 79, just 14 percent of early “silent generation” women were college graduates. This figure rose to 22 percent for late silent generation women of this age, and then to 34 percent for early boomer women. Women’s greater educational attainment is consistent with broader shifts in women’s roles, including greater attention to careers and changes in family structure associated with their greater independence.

Boomers' Influence on Successor Generations

With all the attention that baby boomers received during the late 20th century, many Americans grew up assuming this generation would remain the nation’s largest. Certainly, by the time the last baby boomer was born in 1964, this generation – then comprising 37 percent of the total U.S. population – was seen as a distinct demographic phenomenon. This sense was sustained as the generation continued to augment its numbers with help from new immigrants, reaching 79 million in 1999.

However, the boomers’ oversize presence began to decline as numbers of deaths exceeded the arrival of immigrants in their age group. And while the immediate succeeding generation, Gen X, was smaller in size due to fewer births during the years 1965 to 1980 (a period of lower fertility and relatively slow immigration), the size of its successor, the millennial generation, showed bigger gains via both births and immigration. Thus, in 2019, the millennial generation, born between 1981 and 1996, surpassed the baby boomer generation in numbers and since then, so has Gen Z (those born after 1996).

At the time of latest U.S. census estimates in 2024, the boomer generation, with 20 percent of the population, was the third largest behind the millennials (22 percent) and Gen Z at (21 percent), though still ahead of Gen X (19 percent). However, this was not the case in all states. As the map on page 43 shows, baby boomers still comprise the largest generation in 15 states, including the New England states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut, as well a swath of states running from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania to Delaware. Florida is an interesting outlier. It is the most populous state in this group, where the exceptional size of the boomer cohort can be attributed to senior migration to sunshine and affordable housing. Yet in many other states, the baby boomer population, while smaller than other generations, is still close to them in size. A notable exception: Utah, where baby boomers represent just 14 percent of the population, compared to 27 percent for Gen Z and 22 percent for millennials.

Notwithstanding its size, there are several areas in which it might be said that the baby boomer generation led the way. As noted above, boomers were more racially diverse than generations preceding them, and the generations that have followed are even more diverse. One reason is the impact of boomer immigrants and their children. In addition to their direct contributions via immigration, they also tend to be younger, with a higher share of women in prime childbearing ages. In a similar way, younger generations – notably, the millennials – extend the trends inaugurated by the baby boomers such as higher levels of education, greater trajectories for women’s careers and the formation of a broader array of family types.

Of course, these generational changes have exacerbated some of today’s young-old divides, especially with respect to views on immigration and race (something I call the “cultural generation gap”). But it should be recognized that boomers and their children initiated several societal shifts that were taken up by their successors.

The Baby Boomer Generation Still has Political Clout

The boomers have a large say in who gets elected in national politics by virtue of the size of the cohort, and there are reasons to believe they will remain influential beyond their numbers down the road. This was clearly the case in the 2024 presidential election, when they comprised 31 percent of all voters. This is a higher share than their share of the total population in part because all the boomers are of voting age, and in part because older voters show markedly higher turnout rates than younger voters.

What is especially interesting about the 2024 election results is that even though Donald Trump bested Kamala Harris, the youngold voting patterns were less consistent than many had anticipated. This was an election with many surprising results, one in which the economy and cost of living proved to be high on people’s agenda. Still, with Trump being well-known for promoting immigrant deportations and other policies to block the evolving demographic composition of America, one would have expected his strongest support to come from 65-plus voters. Yet the data on page 44, taken from the 2024 Edison Research exit polls, show that it was the 45- to-64 age group that gave Trump the greatest support of all broad age groups, with a D-R margin (the percent voting Democratic minus the percent voting Republican) of -10. Meanwhile, the 65-plus age group supported Trump by just one percentage point.

Moreover, when comparing sub-populations within these age groups, Trump actually lost to Harris across 65-plus Latino/Hispanic voters, white college graduates and women voters, despite winning these sub-groups among 45- to 64-year-old voters. And though all Black age groups voted heavily for Harris, 65-plus Black voters gave her the strongest support, with a margin of +87.

While the 65-plus age group is a broad one, about three-quarters of its voters were from the boomer generation so it seems reasonable to say that boomers were far less inclined to favor Trump than other seniors. This was confirmed in a separate analysis conducted by the Pew Research Center, which found that among all seniors, only those born in the 1950s – the central decade of baby boomer births – showed a positive margin for Harris (D-R margin of +1), compared with strong Trump support (10+ percentage points) for those born in the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s.

There were presumably many reasons for the tepid Trump support among 2024’s baby boomer voters, including differing views on inflation and health care. But the fact that the strongest anti-Trump faction within the boomer cohort were women, people of color and the college-educated suggests much of this generation’s sensibility about race relations, women’s rights and diversity had something to do with their voting patterns.

One thing is certain though: the clout of boomer voters will not soon decline. Estimates based on population projections and past midterm elections suggest they will comprise more than 30 percent of all voters in the 2026 midterm elections due to even greater old-age turnout advantages in midterm elections. Both Republican and Democratic candidates should take heed.

Baby Boomers Aren't Going Away Quietly

The boomer generation is now entering the “oldest old” age category. Yes, its overall population size will diminish, and there are subgroups including the “okay boomer” crowd that have sharply different views from baby boomers – notably on the economy and the environment. Yet the boomer generation has a history of making its mark in ways that surprise people, often for the better.

That will certainly include altering senior lifestyles and living facilities, along with raising their voices about the need for better health care. But they also have more in common with today’s youth than the senior generations they are replacing. As noted, they are the most racially diverse older generation to date, as well as the most receptive when it comes to the changing roles of women. We should keep an open mind about the possibility that the former “don’t trust anyone over 30” generation will again draw on its vast experience by building bridges with today’s younger generations.