EVEN WELL BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTIONS, Democrats were spending a significant amount of time fretting over the party’s aging leadership. For good reason.
Joe Biden’s age and the party’s initial reluctance to acknowledge the limitations of someone in their eighties laid the groundwork for the party’s midsummer implosion and Donald Trump’s reclamation of power.
Once the election was over, the problem became—somehow—even more acute. Three Democratic members of Congress have died since March (Reps. Gerry Connolly, 75; Sylvester Turner, 70; and Raúl Grijalva, 77), giving Republicans an easier path to advance President Trump’s legislative agenda. Senate Democrats, many of them well past 60, copped to having little understanding of how social media and algorithms shape modern politics, turning to Cory Booker to guide them. Even the party’s base voters think their leaders are too old and weak, especially as the youngest voters, once thought of as reliably liberal, are trending more conservative.
For months, Democrats have grappled with the consequences of aging in office and debated how aggressively the party should act to get older leaders to step aside.
And yet, over time, the issue has begun to resolve itself, either naturally or through strategic decision-making within the ranks. Democrats may still have the aura of geriatrics and a brand that seems painfully out of touch with younger voters. But a change is actually well underway.
Just about everywhere you look in the Democratic party right now—from state houses to Capitol Hill—a new generation of leaders is emerging.
Take, for example, Sen. Brian Schatz. The 52-year-old Hawaiian has locked down his colleagues’ support to be the next party whip after Sen. Dick Durbin retires next year, which would make him the youngest person to be chosen for the No. 2 Democratic leadership position in fifty years. In Texas, James Talarico—a 36-year-old state representative who got the attention of Joe Rogan earlier this year for his viral TikTok videos—has become the de facto face of the Democrats’ resistance to the GOP gerrymandering spree.
On the Hill, graybeards still dominate. As Punchbowl noted: “eight of the 10 longest-serving House members are Democrats” while “fifteen out of the top 20,” and “24 out of the top 30 are Democrats.”
But the up-and-comers aren’t just sitting idly by. Senator Elissa Slotkin, 49, has been a regular presence in the public eye, to a degree that not so long ago would have been considered a faux pas from a freshman senator. Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, 37, has even proposed creating standards that would prevent older lawmakers from serving once they are no longer able to do the basic duties of the job. And earlier this summer, Democrats elected California Rep. Robert Garcia, 47, as their leader on the powerful House Oversight Committee—marking a dramatic shift from just a few months ago after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 35, lost her bid to Connolly, who died shortly after of esophageal cancer.
“There is such a frustration with Democratic party leadership and with the old guard,” said Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits and trains first-time candidates (Talarico is an alum of the program), arguing that the party’s shift toward younger leaders was bound to happen after the Biden presidency.
“That scared people,” she told me. “It left a bruise and a [belief] that we cannot let candidates who clearly are not the right fit for the moment cling to power, cling to the office because they don’t know what else to do.”
While Litman is correct that much of the youth movement has grown out of the ashes of the ’24 loss, it’s worth dwelling for a second on how big this change is for the Democratic psyche. During the first Trump administration, it was the party elders to whom the Democratic base turned to reclaim power. Nancy Pelosi’s seasoned leadership became an object of near reverence—her every act of defiance exalted as a form of shrewd, tactical wisdom, down to the ripping up of Trump’s State of the Union address. Calls for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down were decried as ageist folly, and even jurisprudentially unwise given her record on the Court. It was Biden himself whom the party elevated in the 2020 primary because—the argument went—voters would be drawn to the steady hand amid all the Trumpian chaos.
Now the hopes for stopping Trumpism seem squarely to rest with the younger class and not the party itself. One notable data point: Ocasio-Cortez raked in more individual donations this year than some of the Democratic party’s key campaign arms.
THE FACT THAT THE GENERATIONAL HANDOFF has so far (so far!) been largely peaceful and orderly, rather than typified by David Hogg–style showdowns, has been a great relief for some Democratic operatives with whom I spoke. They and others have been bracing for more direct leadership challenges and primary bids.
Why there hasn’t been more confrontation yet is hard to say. But throughout Capitol Hill, the death of three members of Congress earlier this spring is viewed as a catalyzing moment, forcing older officials to engage in some self-reflection and come to grips with the consequences of staying in the job for too long. A handful of Democratic members of Congress in their sixties, seventies, and eighties have already announced that they will not seek re-election next year.
The candidates jockeying to fill those seats in the 2026 midterms are also incredibly young by Washington standards. So far, everyone who has entered the Michigan primary to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters is in their thirties or forties. The Democratic primary to take on Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is also dominated by candidates in their thirties and forties. It’s almost guaranteed that the median age of Senate Democrats (66.0 at the start of this term) will decrease in the next Congress. (The median age for Senate Republicans at the start of the term was 64.5.)
Despite the enthusiasm for younger leaders, Democrats have avoided being too strict about excluding more experienced candidates. Democratic strategists say they recognize that, in some instances, seasoned candidates are the party’s best shot at winning. As Jill Lawrence noted this morning, despite being 68 years old, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s decision to run for Senate was met with widespread excitement throughout the party—even convincing the much younger Wiley Nickel1 to drop his primary bid. And there’s a robust effort underway to convince Maine Gov. Janet Mills, 77, to challenge Sen. Susan Collins.
But those are the exceptions to the rule. There is an undeniable generational shift taking place among Democrats that will likely reshape the party through the 2028 presidential primary. The Biden experience makes it almost impossible to imagine anyone older than 70 choosing to run. And questions about age will no longer be treated as impolite or taboo, whether the office in question is the presidency or a Supreme Court seat.
“Democrats have valued longevity and there’s so much value placed on occupying the office as opposed to doing something with the office,” said a Democratic strategist. “But I don’t think an RBG situation would be allowed to happen again. The next time there’s a Democratic president, there will be pressure for Sotomayor to step down. And I don’t know how she could fight that. There’s been a sea change.”
🫏 Donkey Business:
— Thanks to Texas and Donald Trump, we are currently staring down a messy redistricting arms race and it’s not clear when or how it will end.
Just a few weeks ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s threat to redraw California’s maps if Texas followed through seemed like bluster. But Newsom has made pretty clear in the past few days that he’s not playing games, even threatening to call a special election to approve new maps if necessary.
And now the fight is spreading, and growing in intensity.
Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who is running to be the gubernatorial nominee, said Wednesday that the South Carolina General Assembly should redraw its district lines to get rid of the lone Democratic seat held by Rep. Jim Clyburn. Retiring Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon also said lawmakers in his state were discussing redrawing their maps to limit Democrats’ chance of flipping his seat. And on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance met with Indiana GOP Gov. Mike Braun about drawing a new map (Braun appeared noncommittal about the whole thing following the meeting).
I checked in with a few redistricting experts today about how they think this will all play out, and the consensus was that we should buckle up and prepare for the brutal back-and-forth to continue. Most states can tweak their congressional maps up until candidate-filing deadlines, which tend to fall in the spring before an election. But if a state wants more time to mess with their map, then the legislature could theoretically push back their filing deadlines.
At this point, the surest way to avoid such a redistricting clusterfuck across much of the country would be for Texas Republicans to stand down. But so far, none of the Democrats’ threats have had any effect on the Lone Star State’s GOP.
— While we’re on the subject, it’s worth noting that the Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas were forced to evacuate from an Illinois hotel on Wednesday morning due to a bomb threat. The lawmakers had been hunkered down in the Chicago area in an effort to deny the Texas GOP the quorum needed to pass the new congressional maps into law.
The lawmakers fled to Illinois in part because the state’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, met with Texas Dem leaders earlier this summer and reassured them that he’d have their back if things got messy, according to a person familiar with the planning. But Pritzker’s commitment could very soon be put to the test.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Thursday that the FBI had agreed to track down the lawmakers that had fled the state. It’s not clear how the FBI would go about doing it and whether they’d attempt to apprehend lawmakers in Chicago—it’s hard to see what federal charges could possibly be appropriate in this situation—but even so, we may soon see some kind of faceoff between federal agents and officials in Illinois. Pritzker, for his part, ridiculed the idea, saying that “FBI agents might show up to, I don’t know, put a show on” but that “there’s no way that our state legislators here, the Texas state legislators, can be arrested.”
My open tabs:
— They Are 16 and 17 Years Old, and They Want to Vote. Like, Now.
— He’s the ‘Mozart’ of Math and Trump Killed His Funding (by my Bulwark colleague Jonathan Cohn)
— A Giant Tub of Mayonnaise Married My Friends
Yes, that’s his real name.