Today's "conservative" elderly voters are the same people that would be considered crazy liberals by their grandparents' standards. They have probably gotten divorced, accept their social security checks, gamble at the riverboat (the biggest demographic for casinos), and listen to rock 'n roll.
Society very, very rarely grows more conservative in an absolute sense. That's why I said to think otherwise is to live in a fool's paradise. The same people used that argument to believe that someday, the younger voters would realize women working was a bad idea or that blacks and whites shouldn't get married. It's faulty logic. People's beliefs get more ingrained as they get older, not less.
Yes, evidence of that insular, self-referential cult I wrote about earlier...