Copyright New York Magazine
Last year’s election debacle, rooted in the rapid decline of the then-81-year-old Joe Biden, took a heavy toll on New Hampshire congresswoman Annie Kuster. “It was the most painful thing I’ve been through since my own parents aging,” she said of her up-close experiences with the former president. “Nobody wants to face incapacity.” It forced Kuster to look hard at her party. Months before the fateful presidential debate that exposed Biden’s frailty, Kuster, at a mere 68 years old, announced her retirement, having served in Congress for 12 years after turning a red seat reliably blue. Though fit and healthy, she was feeling her age on some issues. “We were dealing with AI, cryptocurrency,” she said of her work on the Energy and Commerce Committee. “I am not the person best situated to be dealing with these issues. I did my best to learn, but it’s just time for us to move over.” Now, as debate rages among Democrats over how to improve their party’s abysmal reputation with voters, Kuster worries that the crucial lesson of 2024 has been forgotten, particularly by ancient officials clinging to their seats and seemingly doing everything in their power to prevent a younger generation of politicians from emerging. “People keep asking, ‘What’s wrong with the Democratic Party? What’s the right message?’” Kuster said. “They act like there are magic words. And it’s like, ‘It’s not a question of just getting the right words. It’s that we are too freaking old.’” In This Issue The Flight for the Future of the Democratic Party See All A battle between generations is taking place in races across the country. The mayoral race in New York has pitted 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani against not only 67-year-old Andrew Cuomo but also 74-year-old Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who still hasn’t endorsed the younger candidate, presumably because of some combination of Mamdani’s left-wing, pro-Palestinian positions and his temerity in believing his elders don’t have a monopoly on deciding how politics should be practiced. In Maine, 77-year-old governor Janet Mills, with Schumer’s backing, is hoping to become the oldest freshman ever elected to the Senate in her primary campaign against 41-year-old oyster farmer Graham Platner. There’s also the primary challenge to 76-year-old Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen by 30-year-old lawmaker and community activist Justin J. Pearson; in Georgia, 80-year-old David Scott is trying to fend off 33-year-old Everton Blair. It’s not just radical kids against staid geriatrics: In Massachusetts, centrist Seth Moulton, 47, is challenging progressive stalwart Senator Ed Markey, 79, on generational terms, while in Washington, D.C., former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile took to the Washington Post to implore 18-term congresswoman and civil-rights hero Eleanor Holmes Norton, who at 88 has shown clear signs of cognitive decline, not to run for reelection. In September, when longtime representative Jerry Nadler, at the spry age of 78, sent shock waves through Congress’s thriving senior community with the announcement that he would not seek reelection, some wondered whether it was a sign of change. As he told the New York Times, younger people “can maybe do better, can maybe help us more.” Nadler’s expression of hope on this front was downright moving, in part because his generosity and optimism about the next generation are so rarely expressed by members of his own. Why do so few politicians in his age bracket feel the same way? It’s certainly not the first time an old world has been dying as a new world struggles to be born; the clash between past and future is eternal. But each age is gifted its own specific monsters, and ours are doozies. As Trump’s authoritarian regime rages on, the opposition party is bleeding support, particularly among young people. The challenge for Democrats is to wrest control from the gnarled grip of gerontocracy while containing the chaos that will naturally ensue from younger politicians who are mad as hell at their own party — politicians who are also, by definition, unknown and untested. Since Kuster’s decision to retire, four of her Democratic colleagues — from ages 65 to 87 — have died in office. That number includes Gerry Connolly, the 75-year-old Virginia Democrat who got leadership support in his defeat of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, to chair the House Oversight Committee. It does not include Connecticut congressman John Larson, 77, who suffered a complex partial seizure on the House floor but announced in September, at an event during which the Orleans hit “Still the One” played, that he’ll be running for reelection. Millennials and Generation Z make up more of the adult population than baby-boomers, but they still hold fewer seats in Congress. “That imbalance reflects not just generational inertia,” said political consultant Sean Curran, “but a structural resistance to turnover.” Not all of the old people in Congress are baby-boomers. To silent-generation lawmakers — Maxine Waters, 87; Steny Hoyer, 86; Nancy Pelosi, 85; Bernie Sanders, 84 — boomers are mere children. But there is a whiff of boomer self-regard in this elder intransigence. Arriving in the mid-20th century at a time when culture, technology, and politics were changing rapidly, boomers sometimes behave as though the world began and will end with them. Their conviction that this is the Worst and Most Dangerous Time is matched by their assuredness that they are uniquely situated to steer us out of it, an uncanny mirror of the “I alone can fix it” mentality of our boomer president. There are also more mundane reasons the elderly stick around forever. Former Pennsylvania congresswoman Susan Wild said being the constant center of attention, as well as the perks and trips, “can, of course, be kind of addictive, especially if you’re in a safe seat and don’t have to work your ass off in a campaign.” Jen Bluestein, a political consultant who has worked for EMILYs List, said that much of a politician’s ability to “step away gracefully depends on how much of your identity is tied to the seat. Many can’t imagine doing anything in which they won’t be heavily staffed and relevant all the time.” One former member of Congress told me about a conversation she had on a group work trip with an elderly colleague who needed physical assistance navigating airports. They were chatting about up-and-comers in his state, and the older man acknowledged one particularly talented potential young successor. “Well, so why don’t you retire?” someone asked. “The member literally looked at us and goes, ‘Well, what would I do?’” “A lot of them go past the point where they have anything to stop for,” said one former House member. “There’s a moment when they’ve stayed so long that their grandchildren have already gone off to college and often the spouse dies. Then, literally, their staff is taking care of them.” The results are as macabre as they are deflating. Wild recalled one committee chairman whose staff said he was regularly confused. She once watched this man “fall flat on his face coming up the marble steps, not because he tripped but because he had a very difficult time getting around.” “We have had members on the floor carrying their oxygen,” said the former member of Congress. “We’ve had members go through cancer treatment who don’t show up to vote for months at a time, even when it’s so close. It’s always the sickest ones who are running again and then, sure enough, six months later, we’ll be going to their funeral.” The desire to go on working well past the retirement age of 67 is endemic. When I spoke to Nadler in October, it was clear that he was able to leave in part because he could still picture himself landing another gig. “At the end of next year,” Nadler said, “I will have spent 50 years in elected service — 16 years in the State Assembly and 34 in the House. I’ll be 79 years old. And I’ll say two things: One, you may suffer a loss of ability and cognition, which is very difficult to recognize in yourself. And two, at 79 years old, I still have an opportunity to do something else. I don’t know what that will be, but something.” Nadler paused briefly. “I mean, I could teach,” he said. Curran cited the example of Maine’s George Mitchell, who retired from the Senate at 61 before going on to serve as special envoy in Northern Ireland, where he chaired the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. “There’s a guy who had a statesmanlike career after being in the Senate,” said Curran. “People will throw flowers at your feet if you leave on the right timetable. But you’re only going to get that chance if you get out. If you stay, you don’t get to have the George Mitchell ‘Go to Northern Ireland and figure out the Troubles’ thing.” Congressional leadership has only reinforced the elderly dynamic. Wild described how, after having flipped a seat and then served three terms in a job she really loved, she was depressed about losing in 2024 by one point. Early in 2025, Nancy Pelosi began to call, urging her to get ready to run again. By the time spring came, Wild had decided she was having too full a life outside the House and did not want to be part of the congressional “age problem.” “I’m very fit and active,” said Wild, who is 68. “But I did not want to get to the point of being that person that people are talking about. If I had run next November, I would be 69. And I am a big believer in building a bench. So why did I want to kill myself campaigning for a job that I might only want to keep for two more years?” When she told Pelosi that she wasn’t going to run, Pelosi was unmoved, saying simply, “It’s not about you. It’s about your country.” Some see stepping away as its own service to country. Kuster mentors young women running for House seats and members seeking leadership positions. “The country is on fire, and these young people are waking up and saying, ‘I’m going to run because I can help change this,’” she said. “I want to be on the other end of that phone saying, ‘Keep your head down; keep your courage up. Call me if you get upset.’ That’s what we need to be doing.” Tina Smith, the 67-year-old Minnesota senator who this year announced she would not seek reelection in 2026, said she is leaving in part because of her abiding belief in the next generation: “I was free to make the decision because I was invigorated by being able to see the leaders standing there ready to move into this role.” Young people sometimes approach her and thank her for stepping aside, which leaves her husband bemused. “I think what they’re saying,” she said, “is ‘Thank you for having the good sense to not try to do this forever and to step away and let someone else do it,’ which I think is a good model of behavior.” She laughed. “And, you know, unlike some senators, I’m not burdened by the idea that I’m the only one who can do this job.” Chuck Schumer, the architect of the Democrats’ plans to claw back seats in the Senate, is seen as a top aggravator of the age problem. Schumer first won office in 1974, when he was 23 and the youngest person to serve in the New York State Assembly since Teddy Roosevelt. Back then, his elder colleagues called him “a snotty kid.” He went on to serve in the House of Representatives for 18 years and in the Senate for 26, where he chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 2005 to 2008 and was credited with engineering the super-majority in Obama’s first year in office. “I know that Senator Schumer ushered in a ton of new energy in 2006 and 2008,” said 46-year-old Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor and a candidate for the Senate seat being vacated by Smith. Flanagan so far does not have the backing of Schumer or the DSCC. “He helped bring in a much younger group then,” she said, “and I think voters are ready to do that again.” One longtime political operative was blunter: “I think Schumer wakes up in the morning and thinks it’s 15 years ago.” It’s not that Schumer always backs elderly candidates — for example, he is believed to favor Flanagan’s opponent, the more centrist Angie Craig, who at 53 is not terribly older than Flanagan. But it is widely understood that Schumer badly wanted Mills to enter the Maine race, the winner of which will take on Republican Susan Collins next year in what is seen as a crucial pickup seat for Democrats. Mills, a two-term moderate governor who has been beloved by Democrats and less so by Republicans in the state that she steered through COVID, checks many of Schumer’s boxes. The most important is that she has been a governor and thus won previous statewide elections. This is obviously not a bad metric, but it definitionally selects for older politicians. And as Bluestein observed, “If you’re in a situation where the person is 80 and we are hearing a conversation about the uncompelling vision of Democrats, then that usually sound theory begins to look weak.” A fireplug of a woman, Mills exhibits none of the frailty of some of her chronological peers. She insists that Schumer had nothing to do with her entering the race. “It’s bullshit, the idea that he chose me,” she told me in her office in Augusta. “He didn’t choose me; I chose me. I chose to do this.” Several people who know her suspect that it was not Schumer but the arrival of Platner on the scene that drove her in, since she is known for a lack of patience with young inexperienced people — especially young inexperienced men — who think they can just walk in and do a big job. The political world is certainly packed with mediocre men who leapfrog women. But while Platner may be many things, he is not mediocre: He proved himself early to be a talented communicator, sending Democratic voters into a frenzy of political excitement. Mills brushed off the suggestion that it was Platner’s youth and inexperience that got her in while also saying, “I just want people to be wise. I think people want leadership of whatever age. And it doesn’t necessarily mean throwing out everything that’s happened before.” In mid-October, Mills entered the race against Platner in a slightly botched fashion emblematic of their age difference: While the muscular and soft-bearded oysterman was going viral with clips of off-the-cuff left-populist remarks at town halls, a stilted video of Mills asking for donations went public four days before her scheduled announcement. The reception was not electric. As Susan Wild tweeted, “Janet Mills is ten years older than I am, and now I’m wondering why I decided not to run for Congress again next year because I didn’t want to be part of the aging problem in Congress.” Party elders didn’t help support Mills’s claims that her entrance had nothing to do with them; on the very day she entered, the DSCC rolled out a joint fundraising committee on her behalf. A few days later, opposition research on Platner began appearing in national and state outlets, prompting Representative Ro Khanna, a Platner supporter, to directly accuse the DSCC of digging up dirt. But the dirt was pretty bad. And a race that began as a referendum on Mills’s age quickly turned into a referendum on Platner’s old Reddit posts (which expressed sexist, racist, and homophobic sentiments; a description of his politics as “communist”; and appraisals of cops as “bastards”) and a tattoo that resembled a Nazi skull and crossbones (which he said he got while on leave from the Marines during the Iraq War). Platner has since argued that these ill-considered actions were the product of youth and military culture and that pushing him out of the race would only alienate young voters. “How do you expect to win young people?” Platner asked Semafor. “How do you expect to win back men when you go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics’? Good luck with that. Good luck winning over those demographics.” The problem for Mills and Schumer is that they seem to have underestimated the intensity of voters’ disgust with the status quo. A poll taken amid the bad headlines showed Platner with a stunning 34-point lead over the sitting governor, who not only has universal name recognition but is generally liked. A GOP poll taken in the days after the scandals were reported showed him still leading Mills by 21 points. Some have suggested that progressives are so desperate for a white male working-class political hero that they are willing to overlook a history of intolerant remarks and a Nazi-ish tattoo; Platner’s defenders have said they find his public reckoning with past prejudices and the trauma of his military service persuasive and refreshing. Undergirding both arguments is the likelihood that Maine voters, like voters seemingly everywhere, simply despise the Democratic old guard. Platner’s troubles prove that it is indubitably a good thing that Mills is running and that all this stuff is coming out now. Platner is going to be tested, vetted, forced to defend himself. Score one for the olds, and let’s see how the young man handles himself. Should he survive this turbulent stretch, however, the contest may again revert to a generational showdown with Platner banking on the possibility that Trump-era voters will be ready to metabolize the idea that in the future, many aspiring public figures may have unsavory digital footprints (and regrettable tattoos). As Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits and trains progressive candidates under 40 to run at state and local levels, texted me the day after the Reddit story broke, “Ask Janet Mills what Reddit is.” “Heard of it,” Mills told me, “but I’m not on it. And I don’t have tattoos and I don’t have anonymous names.” The case of Ed Markey against Representative Seth Moulton in Massachusetts offers a different strain of peril for Democrats: not a battle over which kind of Democrat may be able to grab a Republican seat but rather which kind of Democrat should fill a safe one. Moulton’s challenge is explicitly about Markey’s age. “With everything we learned last election, I just don’t believe Senator Markey should be running for another six-year term at 80 years old,” Moulton says in his first Senate ad. “I don’t think someone who’s been in Congress for half a century is the right person to meet this moment.” In 2018, Moulton mounted a failed challenge to Pelosi’s Speakership. In 2020, he embarked on a failed presidential run that didn’t gain him even the kind of national platform of, say, Pete Buttigieg. Two days after Kamala Harris’s loss in 2024, he told a Times reporter, “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or a formerly male athlete,” planting his flag in the anti-woke wing of the party. Markey was challenged by a younger Democrat in 2020, when he was 74 and Joe Kennedy III primaried him. Markey’s long history of environmental advocacy drew young progressives, notably Ocasio-Cortez, to rally behind him, and he beat Kennedy by about ten points. But 80 is a lot older than 74, as Joe Biden will tell you, and the fact Markey won last time with the help of a young generation of Democrats makes his refusal to step aside and create space for those young people all the more maddening to progressives in the state. “I don’t think it’s like 2020, when Ed cleaned Joe’s clock,” said one frustrated Massachusetts politician. Another progressive said to me, “Do I love Ed Markey? I sure do. Should he have left and said it’s time for other people in Massachusetts and a younger generation to serve? Of course he should have.” Had Markey decided not to run, it would have opened the seat to any number of young Democrats, first and foremost Representative Ayanna Pressley, who notably has not yet endorsed Markey. But Bluestein noted, “There are a lot of talented under-75-year-old candidates here who have been waiting a long time for this chance.” Besides Pressley, there’s Lori Trahan, Katherine Clark, Lydia Edwards, and Andrea Campbell. Young progressives, worried about splitting the progressive vote, may be hesitant to jump in against Moulton as long as Markey stays in the race. Many have already thrown their support behind Markey but whisper to one another, “Why is he doing this?” “I wonder if part of it is that he hasn’t read the room broadly, especially post-Biden,” speculated one Massachusetts progressive advocate. “I think it’s not a bad thing that some people have this fierce drive to lead. But why do you think you’re entitled to do it in the U.S. Senate forever against every indicator that it’s a bad idea?” At the same time, it is unclear that Moulton has the juice with young voters that a Mamdani or Platner has. “Seth may be younger, but it isn’t generational change to have some guy who punches down at trans kids,” said one Massachusetts politician. “I don’t think that’s going to be something that sets the youth on fire.” In a September interview, Barack Obama, once an avatar of a brighter future, opined that “it’s fair to say that 80 percent of the world’s problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won’t let go. They build pyramids, and they put their names on everything.” American political structures nurture gerontocracy in ways that are hard to disentangle from individual ambitions. In the House, the Republican Conference voted decades ago to limit leadership of committees or subcommittees to six years as either ranking or chair. Those term limits mean that Republicans in Congress may be more likely to leave the House after they’ve done their time in leadership. But on the Democratic side, where the conference has not adopted leadership term limits, “people are waiting 20, 30 years to be in leadership. Then when they finally get to chair, they’re definitely not going to leave,” Kuster said. Indeed, a startling number of members of the class of 2018 — including Elissa Slotkin, Andy Kim, Mikie Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger, Haley Stevens, Angie Craig, Deb Haaland, Antonio Delgado, Colin Allred, and Katie Porter — have moved on to pursue Senate or gubernatorial campaigns. “So not only do you not have your best and brightest and most energetic leading your House committees,” Kuster said, “but equally importantly, your best and brightest are leaving the House altogether because they don’t see a path forward.” The inability to see a path forward is one of the darkest aspects of our current quagmire. While the olds may think they are saving us by sticking around, what they are often doing is denying the future itself just when Americans most keenly long to be reminded that there is one ahead of us. As Ocasio-Cortez bellowed to a roaring crowd at Mamdani’s rally in late October, “There has been a day before his presidency, and there will be a day after. And it belongs to us.” Willy Ritch, a former congressional staffer and a political consultant in Maine, told me that sometimes he lets himself think, “I don’t care about 30 years from now. I don’t even care about six years from now. I care about right now.” The emergency of now — right now, only now — is certainly compelling, especially in a race for a seat that could determine control of the Senate and thereby put some kind of check on the violent mayhem of the administration. Mills is definitely talking about right now. “I’m not trying to climb a career ladder here,” she told me. “I’m running for one term. Six years.” Those next six years, she said, “are the most critical in our nation’s history, perhaps going back to the Civil War.” As she spoke, her voice cracked. “It’s such dangerous times. Such urgency. It’s not just taking the wrecking ball to the White House. It’s taking the wrecking ball to the Constitution, to our democracy. I can’t sit still and let that happen. I couldn’t if I was 20 years old, 30 years old, 50 years old, and I can’t do it now.” Prioritizing the urgency of now over the chance to build deeper into the future is the trade-off Democrats made when they decided Biden was the only one who could beat Trump in 2020. Would one of the candidates who drew younger support have been a riskier pick in that cycle? Less safe because we have no reassurance of their past victories? Absolutely. Might Trump have won reelection then? He sure might have. Yet six years later, here we are. The short-term grab at a familiar past got us through an immediate crisis, yes, but simultaneously assured a longer-term and more corrosive defeat. A second consecutive Trump term — which then felt like the worst outcome but would have left the right less time to strategize and grow more canny in their malevolent aspirations — would perhaps have been better for the country’s future than what we have now, the bottomless catastrophe where an elderly Biden and his supporters in the Democratic Party dumped us. Photos (top): Getty Images (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call/Tribune News Service/Wild, Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg/Waters, Riccardo Savi/Pelosi, Oliver Contreras/AFP/Smith); Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP (Norton); Redux (Jemal Countess/Nadler, Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The New York Times/Markey, Mark Peterson/Schumer); Leah Millis/Reuters (Mills)
