After Governor Janet Mills entered the Maine Senate race this week, allies of progressive hopeful 40-year-old Graham Platner said the 77-year-old Mills is too old to be running for a six-year Senate term. The next day, 46-year-old center-left Representative Seth Moulton launched a challenge to progressive Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, 79, by explicitly stating that the incumbent is too old. Those instances are the latest examples of how highlighting old age and making unflattering comparisons to Joe Biden are now a way for both moderates and progressives to marginalize and attack fellow Democrats they dislike.
Enough! This fixation on age is misguided, both misdiagnosing the party’s problems and pushing it toward the wrong solutions.
The Democrats, in my view, should be pushing forward politicians who can (1) win their district/city/state, (2) offer the most progressive policy vision possible, considering the area they represent, and (3) demonstrate skills in communication and argument that reinforce and spread liberal ideas to the broader electorate. You can see why “run younger candidates” seems like a shortcut to all three goals. It is likely that, all things being equal, voters prefer candidates in their thirties to fifties over those in their seventies and eighties; that a younger Democratic candidate is more progressive on policy than an older one; and that a younger politician is better at using social media and speaking off the cuff for an hour on a podcast.
So, for example, it makes sense for 30-year-old Justin Pearson to be challenging longtime Representative Steve Cohen, 76, in a congressional district in Memphis. The district is overwhelmingly Democratic, so either candidate will win the general election. But while Cohen has a very liberal voting record and has been a progressive stalwart in the House, he lacks the charisma and media skills of Pearson, who has made himself a national figure despite serving in an overwhelmingly Republican legislature in a red state. (Pearson was one of two Tennessee Democratic lawmakers who were briefly expelled from the legislature in 2023 after protesting how the state’s Republican officials were handling gun legislation.)
But automatically deferring to younger politicians and sidelining older ones falls apart upon even a little scrutiny. Arguably the most prescient and forward-looking figures in the Democratic Party over the last decade have been Senators Bernie Sanders (now 84) and Elizabeth Warren (76). In contrast, Kamala Harris (60) and Hakeem Jeffries (55) are more conservative than necessary on many issues and aren’t particularly skilled at making convincing arguments or using new media.
In Maine, I prefer Platner’s populism to the more moderate Mills. But it’s possible that Mills, even at her advanced age, is a more experienced and therefore effective candidate than Platner, who has never previously run for office. Markey has allied tightly with Warren and progressives in the Senate, while Moulton ran a long-shot centrist presidential campaign in 2020 and seems most interested in advancing his own career as quickly as possible.
Relying too much on older politicians isn’t the main reason that the Democratic Party is struggling. It’s become conventional wisdom that the Democrats have been outwitted politically by the Republicans because the party was dominated by an elderly class of politicians that included Representatives Nancy Pelosi (now 85), Steny Hoyer (86), James Clyburn (85), and Biden (82). But the problem with running Biden in 2024 wasn’t just that he was old. Biden’s words in 2020 about being a “bridge” to the party’s next generation left many voters with the impression he would only serve a single term. His poll numbers plunged in late 2021 and never recovered. He was very reliant on an old theory of politics, namely that voters would reward him for job growth and governing in a bipartisan way. He therefore never realized he needed to change course. And he had that disastrous debate performance, which was perhaps a one-off, since Biden gave speeches and conducted press conferences before and after that debate that were largely clear and coherent.
“Democrats should not run eightysomething presidential nominees” is no doubt a correct lesson to draw from the Biden years. But Mills or Markey or Sanders can probably successfully serve in the Senate, a much less taxing job than the presidency, in their eighties.
What’s really dogging the party is outdated strategies and tactics, such as an overreliance on polling, that are shared by older Democrats but also younger ones like Jeffries and Harris. The Republicans don’t have this problem. Trump is very old too (79), but like Warren and Sanders, he is fairly new to high-level national politics. The Republicans have probably benefited from having a leader who has cultivated a new group of strategists and tactics not tied to the past.
Most of the prominent strategists in Democratic politics constantly tout their experiences working with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. In contrast, Trump has made experience in the inner circles of George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush essentially a negative credential in GOP circles—giving room for new ideas to emerge. While I strongly oppose today’s current Republican Party, it’s effective at using new media, running the most conservative candidates possible, and pushing a coherent vision for the country.
The other problem with this emphasis on youth is that it’s becoming a new form of problematic identity and demographic politics within the Democratic Party. I emphasize “problematic.” Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter of course had identity elements, but they were centered on transformative policy change and were therefore incredibly valuable. Just having more younger Democratic officials, like previous efforts to elect more women and people of color, isn’t alone enough to improve the party. The danger is ending up with a slate of Democratic officials in their forties and fifties who are still bad at winning in purple and red states, pushing bold policies, or using their platforms to win broad support for liberal ideas.
I am not making a politically correct case against ageism. I am acknowledging a reality, particularly for those of us on the progressive side: Younger Democratic politicians are not always our best friends and allies; and sometimes older Democrats are. Yes, age is more than just a number. But it doesn’t capture ideology, conviction, courage, or even social media savvy. Democrats, on all sides, should drop the age arguments and start making their actual arguments.
The post Not All Old Candidates Are Joe Biden, and Not All Young Ones Are Great appeared first on New Republic.
