President Bush's support among older voters has dropped substantially in recent months, eroding recent Republican gains and highlighting the importance of this critical electoral bloc in 2004, political strategists and analysts say. The trend underscores the stakes for Mr. Bush in the current Congressional negotiations aimed at creating a long-promised prescription drug benefit in Medicare, which covers 40 million elderly and disabled Americans. Negotiators passed a self-imposed deadline on Friday for reaching agreement, but vowed to complete their work before Congress adjourns, which is expected to be sometime next month. Mr. Bush's popularity has declined over all since early summer, but some recent polls suggest that he lost significantly more ground among voters 65 and older than he did among younger Americans. Politicians in both parties consider older voters to be particularly important because they are much more likely to vote than younger people, and because they are heavily concentrated in states that are often presidential battlegrounds, like Florida and Pennsylvania. Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, a longtime Republican campaign strategist, said, "It's still a very fluid vote that can swing on a dime." A poll conducted this month by The New York Times and CBS News showed that Mr. Bush had a 41 percent approval rating among the 65-and-older voters, his lowest among any age group. That was down from 44 percent in July and 63 percent in May. Similar trends have been reported this fall by the Pew Research Center. The latest Gallup Poll, released this week, showed that even as Mr. Bush's overall approval rating had risen to 56 percent from 50 percent during the past month, voters older than 65 remained his weakest age group. Forty-nine percent of them approved of the job he was doing, compared with 60 percent of those 30 to 49. Analysts in both parties cite the economy, the stock market and the situation in Iraq as major factors in the slippage, along with more traditional concerns for older Americans like Medicare and the cost of prescription drugs. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/politics/campaigns/19ELDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=