The Democratic Party is feeling the anguish of age.
The deaths of three House Democrats since March has dispirited the caucus and given GOP leaders a little more cushion to move their legislative priorities through Congress.
A new vacancy for ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has revived the dispute over the wisdom of a long-honored seniority system that’s helped to prevent the ascension of younger members.
And new revelations about the deteriorating health of former President Biden, including a newly announced cancer diagnosis, has rekindled the bitter debate over his initial decision to seek reelection in 2024 — a move many in the party say paved the way for President Trump’s return to office.
“This is a problem, and it’s a real conversation that we have to have in our party,” said David Hogg, a 25-year-old vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). “What we need to be thinking about are the millions of people who are now paying the price for not having those conversations.”
At the heart of those talks is an examination of what went wrong in the 2024 election — when Democrats had warned of an existential threat to democracy if Trump won a second term — and how to rebuild their party in the wake of Trump’s resounding Electoral College victory.
But the questions of age, health and party image that have emerged as recurring themes in that autopsy are hardly new to Democrats.
The party has been grappling with generational tensions for years in the House, where former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), 85, retained her grip on power for two decades; in the Senate, where Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), 74, has led the party for almost a decade; and in the Supreme Court, where former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020 at age 87 raised questions about whether she should have retired sooner to allow former President Obama to fill the vacancy.
Between Biden and Ginsburg, some Democrats see a recurring theme of aging officeholders on the left hanging on until it is too late and costing the party the White House and a critical seat on the Supreme Court that could pay dividends for conservatives for decades.
It’s not that Republicans don’t have their own age- and health-related controversies. Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), 83, served as the top Senate Republican for 18 years before stepping aside last January amid concerns about failing health. And Trump, 78, is the oldest president to be elected in the country’s history.
Still, the saga surrounding Biden’s health — both during his presidency and afterward — has been the most conspicuous illustration of a broader controversy, putting Democratic leaders on the defensive and exacerbating internal clashes as the party seeks a delicate balance that melds the experience and knowledge of veteran lawmakers with the energy and communications savvy of younger members.
And it’s hardly the only one.
The deaths of six Democratic lawmakers in the last 16 months — including three this year — have further intensified the conversation around the age and health of lawmakers. The most recent was Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, whose death last week of esophageal cancer is likely to spark a tough contest to fill the seat, pitting senior members of the panel against a younger group clamoring for more influence within the caucus.
The wave of deaths has played to the advantage of House Republicans, whose razor-thin majority has been padded by the vacancies, allowing GOP leaders to absorb more defections on difficult votes.
Those math dynamics were under a microscope last week, when the House narrowly passed Trump’s domestic policy bill by a vote of 215 to 214. In the hours after the dramatic vote, Democrats began to air their grievances on how things might have gone differently.
“Imagine if one of the older and sicker Dems would’ve retired instead of died in office and what that would’ve meant for millions of people,” Rebecca Katz, the veteran Democratic strategist, wrote on social platform X after the vote.
Katz’s assessment is highly debatable: Two Republicans who missed the vote said later that they would have supported the bill, and a third who voted present said he would not have blocked it. With that in mind, the Democratic vacancies were practically insignificant.
Still, other Democrats said focusing merely on the outcome of the vote seemed too granular.
“Whether or not Gerry Connolly or Raúl Grijalva could have practically stopped this vote is besides the point. The margins are so thin right now that every member we have in office is a point of leverage,” said Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something and the author of “When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership.”
And Democratic strategist Jim Manley, an aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said that after years of pushing back on the notion that fresh blood was needed in the ecosystem of the Democratic Party, he’s come to agree that change is necessary.
“For many years, I was a strong supporter of the seniority system,” Manley said. “I resented the idea that people underestimated the knowledge that comes from seniority.
“But after a couple different incidents over the past couple of years including the former president, I believe there’s got to be change,” he said.
Hogg is among those who agree, and he’s stirring plenty of controversy at the DNC for his effort to recruit younger progressive candidates, even if it means challenging sitting Democratic incumbents.
His campaign has sparked an uproar, and the DNC is set to vote in June on whether to redo his election. But Hogg remains unapologetic, saying Democrats’ failure to confront questions of Biden’s health more directly was a “major strategic problem” — one that’s alienated younger voters at the expense of the party’s future.
A more honest conversation, he said, “may have helped change people’s minds.”
