While Democrats across the country are engaged in a debate about how old is too old, in Iowa there is a novel movement to actually have younger people run for office.
With candidates in their 30s and 40s running for governor, Senate and the House, Iowa Democrats are set to turn their red state into a laboratory for whether younger candidates can appeal to voters who have abandoned the party during the Trump era.
But Iowa’s youth movement has also exposed some of the risks when younger candidates seek big offices.
This weekend, as Zach Wahls, a 33-year-old state senator, planned to launch his Senate campaign, some Democratic operatives in Iowa circulated an old message board in which Mr. Wahls, at age 19, had opined about his pornography preferences and volunteered that his parents had given him a subscription to Playboy magazine when he was 16.
The revelations, from a 2011 appearance in an “Ask Me Anything” forum on Reddit, illustrate the potential ramifications of putting forward candidates who have grown up fully in the social-media era. Mr. Wahls is a stark example: He burst to a measure of national political fame at age 19, when he delivered a viral speech to Iowa’s State House about his experience being raised by a lesbian couple.
Other campaigns have confronted similar turbulence. Salacious online posts helped sink Mark Robinson’s race for governor last year in North Carolina, and in 2022 Blake Masters’s Senate run in Arizona was dogged by his strident chat room writings from his college days over a decade earlier.
Mr. Wahls’s 14-year-old Reddit exchange contains revelations about details about his pornography preferences that public figures typically aim to keep private.
“Don’t have any favorite actresses or anything,” he wrote then. “I’ve got a things for tall brunettes. Was all about the Asians when I was younger, but seem to have moved on.”
In an interview Monday, Mr. Wahls said he was unconcerned.
“I think it’s a little funny that some folks are worried about Democrats’ ability to connect with American men, while others think that old Reddit posts by me as a college kid, talking about Playboy and porn like a normal guy would do, would scare me off from running,” he said.
“I don’t care if they push around old Reddit posts from college,” he added. “The next generation of leaders have a bigger digital footprint than older leaders, because we grew up online.”
Mr. Wahls is now among a fleet of younger Iowa Democrats trying to flip Republican-held seats next year.
There is Rob Sand, the 42-year-old state auditor who announced his campaign for governor last month with a selfie video he recorded while walking down a country road. Sarah Trone Garriott, a 47-year-old state senator, is facing Jennifer Konfrst, 51, who is in the Iowa State House, in a primary for the chance to flip a Des Moines-area congressional seat held by Representative Zach Nunn, a two-term Republican.
Already in the Senate race Mr. Wahls is set to enter on Wednesday is J.D. Scholten, a 45-year-old state legislator, and Nathan Sage, 40, who runs the local chamber of commerce in Knoxville, Iowa. Jackie Norris, 54, who served as chief of staff to Michelle Obama, told The Des Moines Register last week she was also considering entering the race.
Those Democratic hopefuls are all vying to face Senator Joni Ernst, 54, a two-term Republican who, at a town hall late last month, dismissed constituents’ concerns about the effects of Medicaid cuts included in legislation passed by the Republican-controlled House by saying, “We all are going to die.”
Rather than apologize, Ms. Ernst mocked her critics in a subsequent video she posted to social media. Her sorry-not-sorry apology led Mr. Scholten to rush his own campaign announcement last week in an attempt to capitalize on outrage over Ms. Ernst’s statements.
Winning statewide in Iowa is an uphill climb for any Democrat, no matter their age. The state has undergone a stark shift in the Trump era from a political battleground where Democrats often won to a deep-red state. Mr. Sand is the lone Democrat elected to statewide office and Republicans have won all four congressional seats in the last two elections.
When Barack Obama carried Iowa in 2008, there were 115,000 more registered Democrats in Iowa than Republicans. According to the Iowa secretary of state’s office, as of May there were 190,000 more registered Republicans in the state than Democrats.
It also makes sense that Iowa Democrats would embrace a youth movement when so many of their older politicians have been defeated or swept out of office by Republicans during the last decade.
Mr. Sand, the state auditor, has carefully curated an image of himself as a bipartisan figure in the state. While Mr. Wahls was an enthusiastic surrogate for Senator Elizabeth Warren in Iowa’s 2020 presidential caucuses, Mr. Sand, who won his office in 2018, declined to endorse any 2020 candidate. And, though Mr. Sand has long made frequent appearances in the national news media, he declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed for this article because it involved other young Iowa Democrats.
Ms. Trone Garriott, a former pastor, said she had been able to bond with voters in her district because she also has young children in the local public schools and has struggled with an economy she said was tilted toward the very wealthy.
“Some of the electeds that we have, have been in office for a very long time,” she said in an interview. “They start to feel like an institution, less than just like a real person. They seem pretty distant because they’ve been so established in government.”
Iowa’s youthful slate of candidates is a notable shift in a state accustomed to electing and re-electing senior citizens.
Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, is 91 years old and in his eighth term. He was first elected to the state House in 1958; his grandson is now the chamber’s speaker. Terry Branstad won six elections as governor before President Trump made him ambassador to China in 2017 at age 71. And Tom Miller, a Democrat who served 10 terms as attorney general, was on a statewide ballot for every election from 1974 to 2022.
“Iowans have always been good to older candidates,” Mr. Miller, now 80, said in an interview. “When I was young, that wasn’t such a good thing. When I was older, that was a great thing.”
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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