The real reasons there are so few young politicians in the US

Hal Rogers has represented Kentucky's 5th district in the US Congress since 1981, and at 88 he is seeking another term. The Republican defeated a primary challenger sixty years his junior to contest November's midterms — an emblem of what is often called America's gerontocracy, rule by the markedly old.

The numbers back up the label. At the start of the current Congress, the average House member was 58 and the average senator 65, and the United States has one of the smallest shares of legislators under 35 among democracies. Scrutiny of the stamina of its oldest leaders keeps surfacing: President Donald Trump is 80, and former Senate leader Mitch McConnell, at 84, faced fresh questions about his health after a months-long absence.

So why do so few young Americans make it into politics? Money is one big answer. Riley Owen, a 27-year-old Gen Z Republican, is contesting a newly drawn House district in Utah that experts say may lean Democratic, but he concedes that cash talks: his opponent, 51-year-old former congressman Ben McAdams, commands a far larger war chest. Experts also cite a two-party system that leaves little room for outsiders, and an electorate that skews old — Pew found voters under 30 were underrepresented in 2024, making up just a fifth of the electorate.

There are countercurrents. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez entered Congress at 29, and campaigners point to Zohran Mamdani, who won his New York City race at age 34 last year, as proof that youth is no bar. Gerontology professor Tracey Gendron cautions against reading too much into birthdays alone: age, she says, is a very poor predictor of capability. Owen takes a similar view — voters, he argues, should judge candidates by what they fight for, not the year they were born.