2026 Senate candidate Janet Mills?
Photo: Andree Kehn/Sun Journal/AP Photos
Joe Biden’s age was a defining issue of the 2024 presidential election as he withdrew after a debate performance that reinforced fears he wasn’t up to the job, much less another four years of it. Aside from the negative effect on Biden’s already weak job-approval numbers, perceptions he was just too old helped insulate Donald Trump, the second-oldest president on his initial swearing in, from concerns about his own age, not to mention his routine incoherence. The age issue also hurt his successor as Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, who had to explain why Biden was suddenly too old to compete in the 2024 election but not too old to serve while it was underway.
In any event, after Trump’s shocking return to power, there was a lot of pointed talk in Democratic circles about the party as a gerontocracy badly in need of fresh blood. But as The Atlantic’s Russell Berman points out, in the party’s most difficult electoral challenge, the uphill battle to flip the Senate in 2026, Democrats are relying more than ever on recruiting old folks to run: After mentioning the joy among Democrats that the 72-year-old Sherrod Brown is attempting a comeback in Ohio after losing in 2024, Berman names some other septuagenarian challengers party leaders have begged to run:
In North Carolina, top Democrats aggressively lobbied former Governor Roy Cooper (68) to run for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Republican senator, Thom Tillis. And in Maine, the party is waiting to see if Governor Janet Mills (77) will challenge five-term Senator Susan Collins, the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbent, who is 72. If they run and win, Brown would be 80 [actually, he’s running for the two-year stub of J.D. Vance’s term, so he’d only be 76], Cooper would be 75, and Mills would be 85 at the end of their first Senate terms.
On top of that, the chief party leader trying to put together Team Old Folks for 2026 is Chuck Schumer, who is 74.
So what’s going on? Are advancing ages causing so much short-term memory loss that Democrats are forgetting the lesson of 2024? Is it time for the car keys to be taken away from all these old politicians?
It’s a good idea to unravel the various impulses behind the “fresh blood” talk after this past November. Yes, there are some Democrats who quite literally think the problem is Democratic candidates and elected officials are just too old. Berman quotes one of them, Amanda Litman of the candidate-recruitment organization Run for Something:
Litman has called for every Democrat over the age of 70 to retire at the end of their current term in office. A few have heeded that message: Earlier this year, Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois (80), Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (78), Tina Smith of Minnesota (67), and Gary Peters of Michigan (66) all announced that they would not seek reelection next year. But in some of the nation’s biggest Senate races, Democrats are relying on an old strategy of recruiting — and then clearing the field for — long-serving party leaders with whom voters are already familiar.
The controversial and recently defenestrated DNC vice-chair, David Hogg, has also argued for primary challenges to what he considers superannuated Democratic politicians. But for both Litman and Hogg, something else is going on besides a desire for more youth: the belief that the old folks who exasperate them are part of a Democratic Establishment that just isn’t sufficiently progressive to suit their convictions. You don’t hear a lot of complaints from left-bent advocates of “generational change” in the Democratic Party that Bernie Sanders, who is older than Biden, needs to get out of the way. So is the problem really age or ideology? Are the demands for change really just based on the left’s ancient claim that there’s a hidden majority for their views?
There’s a third motive behind the fresh-blood mantra that’s a little different from the generational or ideological rationales: the belief that Democrats are too quick to give support and resources to candidates who failed in the past. In Texas, for example, the two most familiar proto-candidates for a ripe Senate race that could become red hot thanks to a vicious Republican primary are Colin Allred and Beto O’Rourke. Some Texas Democrats (and national donors) think Allred underperformed in his 2024 race against Ted Cruz. But he’s “fresher” than O’Rourke, who has lost three straight statewide races (the first to Cruz as well). Neither of these men are old (Allred is 42, O’Rourke is 52). But the fresh face many Democrats are longing for is state representative James Talarico, as the Texas Tribune reports:
Already a Democratic rising star, Talarico, a fourth-term representative from Austin, has been ubiquitous since Democrats decamped to Illinois Sunday over a Republican plan to redraw Texas’s congressional map. The 36-year-old has appeared everywhere from network television to podcasts to Washington newsletters, flooding the zone with discussions of the redistricting clash.
He logged 25 interviews in the first 24 hours of the quorum break and reached 9.8 million viewers around the country through his TV hits alone, he told the Tribune.
Talarico, a seminary student and former teacher, has built a large social media following, including on TikTok, through his criticism of Christian nationalism as a progressive Democrat and devout Christian himself. A number of Talarico’s widely circulated clips show him confronting Republican colleagues on the House floor during the legislative session that ended in early June. Shortly after, he revealed his interest in a possible 2026 Senate run.
At this point Talarico isn’t ideologically distinct from Allred or O’Rourke, and he’s not that much younger than Allred. But he’s got media buzz and doesn’t have the stigma of a past defeat.
Berman is right, however: In the most winnable Senate races, Democrats are counting on gray-hairs with proven winning records. We’ll see how that works out. But the real test of the “Biden lesson” could come in 2028, when Democrats will face an epochal choice of a leader to define them as the country heads into a post-Trump era. If they want to project youth, they have options like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (now 35), Pete Buttigieg (now 43), or Wes Moore (now 46). If they want a distinct move in a more progressive direction, there’s AOC and Ro Khanna. If it’s “freshness” in the sense of a new face or a political outsider that Democrats crave, it’s possible we haven’t even met the next leader yet, but that impulse wouldn’t be the best news for warhorses like Gavin Newsom, who’s not that old (57) but has been in public office since 1997.
There will be plenty of time for Democrats to define, and then identify, “fresh blood.”
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