The Old, Old, Senate
And how it got that way
Political scientist Adam Bonica for the win:
As he says: “So, I've heard jokes about the Senate looking like a retirement home... but um, it's kinda true. The age distribution of Senators is almost identical to The Villages, the largest retirement community in the U.S.”
United States Senators are really, really, old. There’s nothing wrong with some aging Senators; there’s something very out of whack when the more than half of them have reached 65.
My reaction to this is the same as it always is: If you consider having a very old Senate as a problem, the source of the problem isn’t Senators such as Mitch McConnell who stick around forever; it’s Senators such as Peter Welch and Tommy Tuberville who enter the chamber when they’re already old.
With the election over, it’s time to check in on how this went in 2024. To begin with, there are plenty of new Senators — twelve of them so far, with two more to come when J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio resign. Turnover isn’t the problem!
The average age of the newcomers, as of January 3, 2025? Fifty-four.
Once upon a time that might have been the age of the oldest incoming Senator. Now it’s almost good by recent standards. After all, five of the nine new Senators elected in 2020 were already 60 or older by the time they took office. This time, it’s “only” four of twelve. It used to be unusual for someone that old to be a first-time Senator. In the big landslides of 1974 (for Democrats) and 1980 (for Republicans), not a single new Senator was had reached 60.
And it’s not as if the new old Senators leave quickly. Bernie Sanders, for example, was just re-elected for what he now says is probably — probably! — his final term. He’s 83. He’ll begin his 4th Senate term in January, after beginning his Senate career at age 65. The problem, of course, is that time only runs one way. Young Senators can stay in office and eventually give the chamber age diversity, but someone entering at 65 is never going to be 45, or 40, or 30. And so if even a third of the Senate enter when they’re already getting up there, the chamber as a whole is going to have lots of people in their 70s and 80s and very few young politicians.
Again, it didn’t used to be like that.
As far as I know, there’s very little known about why we’ve things have changed. I certainly don’t blame general election voters. If you are a Republican in West Virginia this November, even if you wanted a young Senator you weren’t going to vote for Glenn Elliott (birth date not available, but he graduated high school in 1990) over Jim Justice (born 1951).
Bonica does point to research from Jake Grumbach showing that candidates overall are older, and Bonica and Grumbach’s recent paper suggests that campaign finance is a reason.
At any rate, the problem is at the nomination stage. Parties are not recruiting enough younger candidates — and they’re far too eager to settle for names they are long familiar with.1 Perhaps part of this is beyond the ability of party actors to correct in the short run, if few younger candidates are stepping up in the first place. But it seems pretty likely that had Vermont Democrats could have found someone else for a very safe seat in 2022 had they encouraged Peter Welch, who was then 75, to stay in the House instead of rushing to endorse him. And California Democrats didn’t seem at all unhappy this year about supporting Adam Schiff (born 1960) over Katie Porter (born 1974).2 Look: Obviously there are more things than age at stake in party nominations. Still, parties too often seem eager to use Senate nominations as lifetime achievement rewards.
Perhaps there’s some hope. As Seth Masket demonstrates, parties have fairly wide latitude on how they interpret and what they blame for losses (regardless of the actual facts of the matter), and once they settle on an explanation it affects how they proceed in the next election cycle. It’s at least plausible that one of the chief stories Democrats tell themselves about 2024 will be the dangers of aging candidates. If so, that could affect future nominations at all levels, not just the presidency. And if that happens, and if they then bounce back and win in the midterms and in 2028, perhaps Republicans would adopt the same lesson. But that’s a lot of ifs, and I’m not particularly optimistic any of it will happen.
It would be nice though.
To the best of my knowledge we still don’t have a good assessment of how how much campaign money is properly thought of as party money — or at least what I consider party money, raised within and by the party network — and therefore, in this instance, whether troubles caused by campaign financing are fundamentally caused by party decisions or not. Frankly I don’t think we even know how properly to characterize large amounts of money raised through party-aligned portals from folks who otherwise aren’t particlarly active in party politics. I do suspect parties are central to campaign finance in recent cycles, but certainly can’t say so for a fact.
Perhaps because the other choice was Barbara Lee, who was born in 1946. It’s bad for the state, too. Welch and Schiff had built up seniority in the House, and both of them abandoned that — and forfeited the chance for a young new Senator to build up Senate seniority. Seniority in either chamber isn’t what it was some 75 years ago, but it’s not nothing, even now.