Republican presidential candidates typically carry older voters by solid margins, and in his first campaign Mr. Trump bested Hillary Clinton by seven percentage points with voters over 65. He won white seniors by nearly triple that margin.

Today, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are tied among seniors, according to a poll of registered voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College…

The grievances of these defecting seniors are familiar, most or all of them shared by their younger peers. But these voters often express themselves with a particularly sharp kind of dismay and disappointment. They see Mr. Trump as coarse and disrespectful, divisive to his core and failing persistently to comport himself with the dignity of the other presidents that they have observed for more than half a century. The Times poll also found that most seniors disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of race relations and of the protests after the death of George Floyd…

Karen Gamble, 65, of Reidsville, N.C., said that she was dissatisfied with the overall government response to the coronavirus outbreak and echoed many popular complaints about Mr. Trump’s persona. She said she wished, for instance, that Mr. Trump “wouldn’t be such a bully and would conform to being in a regal-like position, as our presidents have always been.”