The U.S. Congress is aging faster than the country, young Americans are walking away from the polls, and the system is built so that whoever already holds the seat wins. In 2026 this structure cracked for the first time, but money and the Constitution will not let it collapse.
On November 3, 2026, 88-year-old Hal Rogers will run for the House of Representatives for the twenty-fourth time. The residents of Kentucky's 5th District first sent him to Washington on November 4, 1980, the same night Ronald Reagan routed Jimmy Carter under the slogan "Let's Make America Great Again," which Donald Trump would appropriate three and a half decades later. Leonid Brezhnev was still alive. More than half of today's U.S. population had not yet been born. In May, Rogers comfortably won the Republican primary against four challengers, one of whom is sixty years his junior, and election models put the chances of his Democratic opponent, attorney Ned Pillersdorf, in tenths of a percent.
"We should thank Hal Rogers for his 46 years in office," Kevin Smith, one of the Republicans who lost to him, said on May 19 after casting his ballot in his hometown of London. The voters thanked him. Then they sent Rogers back to Washington.
Elected the Same Night as Reagan
Rogers is not alone. Chuck Grassley, who turned 93 in September, entered the Iowa legislature in 1958, when Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states. Today he chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as president pro tempore of the upper chamber he stands third in the line of presidential succession, right after the vice president and the speaker. President Trump turned 80 in June. He returned to the White House at 78, becoming the oldest person ever to take the presidential oath, and his predecessor, Joe Biden, left the Oval Office at 82.
The numbers confirm what is plain to the naked eye. According to the Pew Research Center, at the start of the current 119th Congress the median age of a House member was 57.5 and of a senator 64.7. The median American is about 39. In other words, the typical senator is a quarter century older than the typical voter. The gap built up over decades: in the early 1980s, according to Congress's own data, the median age was 48 in the lower chamber and 52 in the Senate. The current membership ranks among the three oldest in the history of the American legislature.
My generation, which entered journalism in the twilight of the Soviet era, grew used to seeing Washington as the antithesis of Kremlin gerontocracy. Forty years later, the antithesis has begun to look suspiciously like the original.
The Gun-Carriage Race, American Edition
Anyone who was a schoolchild in November 1982 needs no explanation of the word "gerontocracy." Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, at 75. Fifteen months later Andropov was gone, and thirteen months after that, Chernenko. People dubbed those years the "gun-carriage race," and only on March 11, 1985, did a plenum of the Central Committee elect 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, who by the standards of that system looked almost like a youth.
The analogy is imperfect, and I admit it. Rogers could have been beaten in a primary. Biden was forced out of the race by his own party on July 21, 2024, 107 days before the election, after his disastrous June 27 debate. Pelosi is leaving voluntarily: she announced the end of her career on November 6, 2025, at 85. In May 2025, four months after leaving the White House, Biden's office disclosed a diagnosis of an aggressive form of prostate cancer. The news instantly brought back into the American debate the question of how candid the president's inner circle had been about his health in the final years of his term. A Soviet general secretary never faced reelection and never held press conferences. Yet the mechanics are similar: the system rewards seniority, and seniority is almost always directly proportional to age.
The consequences are similar too. Dianne Feinstein died a sitting senator on September 29, 2023, at 90. That spring, her months-long absence paralyzed the Judiciary Committee, through which Democrats were moving federal judicial nominees. In 2025 the rhythm became almost funereal. First, in early March, 70-year-old Sylvester Turner of Texas died, shortly after sitting in the chamber for Trump's address to Congress. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, 77, died on March 13, and Gerry Connolly of Virginia, 75, on May 21.
Connolly's story deserves a line of its own. In December 2024, already aware that he had esophageal cancer, he beat 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the intraparty contest for ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, the opposition's chief instrument against the White House. Five months later he was dead, and the committee that mattered most to Democrats was left without a permanent leader in the thick of the first year of Trump's second term.
To be fair, dying in office is nothing new. In the 1980s, 29 members of Congress died, more than in any subsequent decade. The difference lies elsewhere. From 2020 through 2025, 14 lawmakers died in office, compared with 12 in all of the 2010s, and this is happening in a Congress where majorities are measured in single-digit seats. After Connolly's death, the House stood at 220 Republicans to 212 Democrats. Every obituary became a matter of arithmetic.
When a Hospital Bed Outweighs a Bill
The summer of 2026 illustrates that arithmetic best of all. Mitch McConnell, 84, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, fell at his Washington home, briefly lost consciousness, and was hospitalized on June 14. Pneumonia and a rehabilitation facility followed, from which he was released only on August 6. At first his office stayed silent for weeks about the senator's condition, and the vacuum was immediately filled with rumors, including fake reports of his death. Kentucky's Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, publicly demanded proof that McConnell was capable of performing his duties.
The political price proved concrete. From mid-June to August 8, McConnell missed all 60 roll-call votes. With a 53-to-47 split, the Republican Senate majority looks comfortable only on paper. In August a new farm bill stalled in the Agriculture Committee: without McConnell's vote it failed to secure a majority, losing 10 to 11.
On September 14, McConnell returned to the Capitol in a wheelchair. "Time to get back to work," he told reporters. His departure from the Senate is scheduled for January 2027. He had fallen before, suffering a concussion in 2023 and a wrist injury in 2024. In the summer of 2023 he twice froze mid-sentence in front of the cameras. Throughout, the party preferred not to notice the problem, because McConnell's vote was needed and his stature made any talk of replacing him unseemly.
The Chair No One Gets Up From
Why don't American politicians leave? The answer is prosaic: leaving does not pay, and the system does not know how to push them out.
The first mechanism is seniority. For decades, committee posts in Congress were allotted by length of service, and the chairman's gavel went to whoever had sat at the table longest. From 2011 to 2017 Rogers chaired the Appropriations Committee, the chamber's key fiscal body, and for Appalachian Kentucky, one of the poorest regions in the country, his chair was a pipeline for federal money. Voters in 33 counties of southern and eastern Kentucky are not voting for age. They are voting for access to the budget that a newcomer cannot deliver.
Maxine Waters, the 88-year-old representative from California, has led the Democrats on the Financial Services Committee since 2013, and from 2019 to 2023 she was its chair, the first woman and the first African American to hold the post. If Democrats retake the House, she intends to pick up the gavel again and become the oldest chair in the committee's history. In March 2026 she answered questions about her age by pointing to her own energy and to the nickname young progressives know her by: "I'm Auntie Maxine." On October 13, 54-year-old Sean Casten of Illinois informed her that he would run for the post. His odds are modest: Waters relies on the Congressional Black Caucus, which reacts sharply to any attempt to remove its members from leadership positions, and on strong institutional support.
The second mechanism is money. American campaigns are expensive, and donors bet on whoever has already won. Incumbent House members hold their seats more than nine times out of ten, cycle after cycle, and the backers know it. Money attracts money, and a man who has served since 1981 has something a 27-year-old challenger lacks: a forty-year Rolodex of grateful lobbyists and local businesspeople.
Above both mechanisms stands a legal structure, and it is the most durable of all. The U.S. Constitution sets only a minimum age: 25 for the House of Representatives, 30 for the Senate, 35 for the president. There is no maximum. In 1995, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that states may not limit the number of terms for members of Congress, thereby nullifying such provisions that 23 states had adopted by that time. Any limit is now possible only through a constitutional amendment, which requires two-thirds of the vote in both chambers and ratification by 38 states. Put simply, only lawmakers themselves can impose an age limit on lawmakers, and they have no intention of doing so.
The Generation That Left the Polls
An elderly Congress is half the equation. The other half is young Americans, who take part in choosing it less and less.
According to the same Pew Research Center, citizens aged 18 to 29 accounted for 25 percent of all nonvoters in the 2020 election. In 2024 their share rose to 30 percent. This age group made up 20 percent of eligible voters but cast only 15 percent of all ballots. A politician who counts votes draws the obvious conclusion: you speak to the people who show up. Retirees show up. Their concerns, Social Security and Medicare, set the agenda, while housing costs for thirty-somethings and student debt fall by the wayside. The circle closes: young people do not see their issues in politics and do not vote, and politicians do not see young people at the polls and do not talk about their issues.
The disillusionment is measurable. A spring 2025 Pew survey found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 believe that few or no elected officials are honest. Among people over 50, the figure is 45 percent. Of the 25 countries in the study, only in Greece were young people even gloomier.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union, which keeps global statistics on young legislators, consistently places the United States near the bottom of its ranking by average lawmaker age. According to the union's 2023 data, members aged 45 and under made up just over 32 percent of parliamentarians worldwide. In Norway, nearly one in seven members is 30 or younger. The contrast is explainable: in Scandinavia's multiparty systems, governing parties absorb social movements, whereas the American two-party model leaves a narrow corridor of views, and politically active young people leave the parties for single-issue campaigns on climate or housing. More alarming is something else. In April 2026 the Inter-Parliamentary Union reported that youth representation in the world's parliaments had stopped growing for the first time since monitoring began in 2014.
There is also an everyday dimension that is rarely discussed aloud. The United States has no federal paid parental leave law. Only a few dozen lawmakers are raising children under 18, and only a handful of women have become mothers while serving in Congress. In August 2026, 37-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, who entered the House at 29, said she had begun the process of freezing her eggs. That same week, on August 12, Karoline Leavitt, who became White House press secretary at 27, the youngest in history, announced her departure. "I cannot be the wonderful mother my two young children deserve if I give this job all the time, energy and attention it demands," she wrote on X. Vice President JD Vance, 42, has acknowledged that his four young children are weighing on his decision about a 2028 presidential run.
American politics is built for people whose children are grown. Small wonder that those are precisely the people who stay in it.
The Revolt of 2026: Seven Scalps and One Misfire
Nevertheless, in 2026 the dam cracked. It happened inside the Democratic Party, where age turned from a delicate subject into a weapon.
The tally is impressive. Seven incumbent House Democrats lost their primaries, five of them of retirement age. On August 11, 78-year-old John Larson of Connecticut, who had served in the House for nearly three decades, lost by more than 20 percentage points to 47-year-old former Hartford mayor Luke Bronin. Diana DeGette of Colorado, 69, lost to a challenger tied to the Democratic Socialists of America. The same fate befell 71-year-olds Shri Thanedar of Michigan and Adriano Espaillat of New York. Texas House veteran Al Green, after a Republican redraw of district lines, lost to 38-year-old Christian Menefee. By this measure, 2026 tied 2012 as the worst year for incumbent Democrats in primaries this century. The pressure was widespread. Among members of Congress who chose to seek reelection in 2026, thirteen were past 80, and many of them faced serious primary challengers for the first time in years. Progressive activists counted more than 210 candidates who challenged incumbents over 65, more than 80 of them millennials or members of Gen Z, nearly four times as many as in 2024. The source of these figures is partisan and has a stake in big numbers, but the order of magnitude is borne out by the results. The purge would have been larger had an entire cohort of veterans not chosen to retire early rather than wait to be humiliated.
The revolt has a financial infrastructure. David Hogg, the former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, pledged $20 million through his organization, Leaders We Deserve, to back young challengers against sitting members of Congress. It also has a symbol. Zohran Mamdani became the youngest mayor of New York since 1892 at 34, and already this cycle his endorsement helped 57-year-old Brad Lander oust incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman from the House.
Now for the misfire, which matters more than the victories. On September 1, 80-year-old Senator Ed Markey, who has represented Massachusetts in Washington since November 1976, crushed 47-year-old Congressman Seth Moulton, 64.8 percent to 35.2 percent. Moulton built his campaign around generational change. Markey answered with ideology, staking out the left flank, and won. Earlier, in March, 78-year-old Bennie Thompson of Mississippi fended off a young challenger.
Hence the season's main lesson: Democratic voters punish not age but impotence. They throw out the old-timers who seem to them listless in the fight against Trump and keep the old-timers who seem combative. That is exactly why 85-year-old Bernie Sanders remains an idol of the young. Year of birth has become a convenient label for a grievance of a different kind, against an establishment that, in the view of the rank and file, has forgotten how to fight.
Among Republicans the picture is different. Rogers and Grassley face no serious pressure, because in Trump's party the decisive factor has become loyalty to the leader rather than the date on one's birth certificate. Rogers himself, incidentally, secured Trump's endorsement. In 2024 the MAGA movement won a notable share of young men's votes, and for these voters the age of an 80-year-old president is no obstacle. Gerontocracy works differently in the two parties: among Democrats it is being eroded by their own base, while among Republicans it is preserved by a cult of the leader.
Utah: 27 Years Old Versus $2.6 Million
The most telling race this fall is playing out in Salt Lake City. After years of litigation over Utah's congressional map, a court approved new boundaries, and the 1st District, covering most of Salt Lake County, became openly Democratic for the first time in decades. Under these lines, Kamala Harris would have won about 60 percent of the vote here in 2024.
Republicans fielded 27-year-old Riley Owen, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer and former White House staffer who worked on industrial policy. On April 25, at the party convention in Orem, he won 71.2 percent of the delegates' votes and took the stage to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," declaring that his generation must reclaim the American dream. Owen's platform fits poorly with the Republican stereotype: paid parental leave and a ban on stock trading by members of Congress. On top of that he adds environmental protection, an issue his party usually leaves to the Democrats. At the September 29 debate at Salt Lake Community College, he broke with Trump on trade and immigration and sparred with his opponent over data centers and the regulation of artificial intelligence.
His opponent is 51-year-old Democrat Ben McAdams, the former Salt Lake County mayor and a former congressman who represented Utah from 2019 to 2021. In June he comfortably won the primary against progressives. According to the Federal Election Commission, by mid-October McAdams's campaign had raised more than $2.6 million, Owen's about $150,000. That is a ratio of roughly 17 to one. Over the summer the gap looked even more dramatic: in the August filings, McAdams reported about $300,000 cash on hand, Owen $9,500. Different snapshots yield different ratios, but the conclusion is the same. Owen himself calls money the central problem of American politics and concedes that his opponent's advantage, backed by outside donors and corporations, is very steep.
The forecast here is easy: on November 3 McAdams will win, and by my estimate by a margin of at least 15 points. Owen will lose not because of his age but because of his party label in a Democratic district and the money gap. His campaign is nonetheless more interesting than the outcome. A young Republican who criticizes gerontocracy as a disease of both parties has, single-handedly, described the problem more precisely than many professional commentators: Washington does not work for its citizens, and the campaign finance system guarantees that the same people will keep doing the work. "What matters much more to me is what you stand for and what you fight for than what year you were born," Owen said in one of his fall interviews. Markey could have said the same words almost verbatim.
Age Is Not a Diagnosis, Seniority Is Not a Merit
An honest caveat is needed here, or this piece will turn into a pamphlet against the elderly. Gerontologists have long warned that chronological age is a highly unreliable indicator of cognitive ability. A 45-year-old politician struggling with depression or addiction may be less capable than an 85-year-old veteran with a clear head and unerring political instincts. Congress is as unrepresentative of American society in age as it is in gender or racial makeup, and reducing the debate over representation to a single number is an oversimplification.
Experience is worth something, too. Someone who remembers how the Dodd-Frank Act was written after the 2008 crisis understands financial regulation better than a newcomer, and Waters insists on this not without reason. An old politician who has lived through several wars and recessions is less likely to repeat mistakes that a young one will make with enthusiasm.
Americans, however, reject this dialectic. A national poll conducted April 27–30, 2026, among 1,322 adults found that 80 percent support a maximum age limit for congressional candidates. Among Republicans, 83 percent favored a limit, among Democrats 78 percent. Independents came in at 79 percent, and older respondents supported the idea no less often than younger ones. Term limits drew 83 percent approval. A rare consensus in a country that can agree on almost nothing. Such numbers, however, should be taken with a grain of salt: endorsing a hypothetical reform over the phone costs nothing.
Herein lies the central paradox of American gerontocracy. The same voters who demand an age ceiling in polls reelect their own particular 88-year-old congressman time after time with more than 80 percent of the vote. They despise Congress in the abstract and value their own representative. In 2024 Rogers won his primary with 81.8 percent, and in the general election he had no opponent at all: 261,407 votes, one hundred percent. No one imposes gerontocracy on the United States. It is chosen, district by district, one familiar face at a time.
Ronald Reagan understood this better than anyone. On October 21, 1984, at a debate in Kansas City, the 73-year-old president, then the oldest in history, dispatched the question of his age with a single line: he promised not to exploit, for political purposes, his 56-year-old opponent Walter Mondale's youth and inexperience. The audience laughed, and so did Mondale. Two weeks later Reagan carried 49 states. The joke still works in American politics, except that now it is 80-year-olds joking about 50-year-olds.
There Will Be No Ceiling
Let me try to put forward claims that can be checked.
First. On November 3, 2026, Hal Rogers will be reelected with more than 70 percent of the vote. Second. No constitutional amendment imposing an age limit on members of Congress will be brought to a floor vote in either chamber before the end of the 120th Congress, that is, before January 2029. Third. In January 2027, when Pew publishes its next count, the median age of the new House of Representatives will be below 57: the wave of retirements and primary defeats will make the lower chamber younger. The Senate, where terms last six years and only a third of the seats can turn over in a cycle, will remain above 63. Fourth. If Democrats win the majority, Maxine Waters will retain leadership of the Financial Services Committee in January 2027, and Casten will not win the backing of the caucus's Steering Committee.
Renewal, therefore, will come not from the top, through legislation, but from the bottom, through primaries, and it will be slow and concentrated almost entirely in one party. Democrats are getting younger because their base is angry. Republicans are preserved in amber as long as their base is enchanted by a leader who will turn 82 in 2028. One question remains to which I have no answer: what will become of this structure on the day the leader departs and the line of heirs turns out to be as gray as the Senate benches?
In early January 2027, the members of the 120th Congress will be sworn in on the floor of the House of Representatives. Hal Rogers, who will turn 89 just before the New Year, will raise his right hand for the twenty-fourth time. A few rows away, Maxwell Frost of Florida, the first member of Congress from Generation Z, will take the oath. Rogers first swore to defend the Constitution in January 1981, sixteen years before Frost was born.