Democrats are slowly waking up to their generational issues

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) isn’t planning to run for reelection. Among the reasons he offered the New York Times was that “[w]atching the Biden thing” — presumably meaning the focus placed on the former president’s age and capacity — “really said something about the necessity for generational change in the party, and I think I want to respect that.”

OK, sure. But, meaning no disrespect to Nadler, come on.

Nadler has been in the House for more than three decades. He was of traditional retirement age before “Frozen” was released. It’s a bit hard to believe that his retirement now is centrally about meeting the needs of the Democratic base when the visible demand for generational change within the party is itself years old. I mean, Biden in 2020 called himself a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic politicians!

My book about the generational divide in the U.S. came out more than two years ago, but I started writing it more than two years before that. While the Biden presidency issue served as the most acute example of generational tension, the tension both preceded and followed that period.

Data from VoteView suggests that, at the end of the current, 119th Congress, the average age of those who served in the House in 2025 and 2026 will be 59.1 years. That’s slightly higher than a decade ago and nearly two years higher than the average 20 years ago.

You can see that the average age in the House began to swing upward in about 1996 (indicated by the vertical line). On the Senate side, the upward push began earlier, in 1982. The average age of those who served in the 119th Senate will be 65.2 years at the end of next year — right at the traditional retirement age.

This upward push mirrors the aging of the population overall. Members of the baby boom (generally defined as those born from 1946 to 1964) are aged 61 to 79. They pushed average ages downward in the 1980s and 1990s as they got elected to Congress. They’ve been a central part of why those ages have increased steadily since.

In the House in particular, there’s been a big difference in the average ages of Democrats and Republicans. In the Senate, those averages have moved in concert over the past few decades. In the House, a big gap emerged beginning in the Tea Party era.

For the congress that ended 2012, the average age of Democrats who’d served was more than five years higher than the average for House Republicans. (Nadler, at the time, had just turned 65.) It has since gotten better, but House (and Senate) Democrats are still older on average than Republicans.

This is particularly a problem for them because the Democratic Party is more dependent on votes from younger Americans. Those younger Americans are also less likely to be members of either political party than are older people; it is not hard to imagine that a lack of national representation of young people is helping drive indifference to the party as an institution.

Even today, more than 4 in 10 members of the House — and nearly two-thirds of the Senate! — are members of the baby boom generation or older. About 1 in 6 House Democrats are millennials or younger (using Pew Research Center’s definitions).

Only a handful of senators from either party are millennials or younger, a generational group that included more than half of the population in 2024. Maybe they should have some representation!

Nadler, incidentally, is not a baby boomer. He’s a member of the silent generation, the generation that preceded the boom.

Photo: The first baby born in 1959, supposedly. (National Archives)