Youth Is No Substitute for Politics
A new crop of young Democratic Party challengers is running on generational politics alone, hoping to capitalize on voters’ hunger for change without running afoul of the centrist establishment’s political preferences.
Twenty-five-year-old social media influencer Deja Foxx campaigned unsuccessfully this year to replace late Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva. (John Nacion / Variety via Getty Images)
Youth and hope have been linked in human imagination since time immemorial. Now a new wave of Democratic challengers is capitalizing on that deep cultural association to bypass substantive politics entirely, hoping that the prospect of generational turnover will be enough to win over voters hungry for change.
“What party will my generation inherit? I am a version of that newer and younger leader that we should be investing in and that every establishment politician says they want,” declared twenty-five-year-old US congressional candidate and social media influencer Deja Foxx during her campaign earlier this year to replace late Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva.
Though Foxx had generated the most national media coverage among insurgent candidates not named Zohran Mamdani this election cycle, other challengers like Liam Elkind in New York, George Hornedo in Indiana, and Jake Rakov in California are seeking to capture the same kind of attention that can provide an easy, appealing, and thematically potent draw for disillusioned voters. These candidates are all at least fifteen years younger than the incumbent House member in their district (or, in Foxx’s case, the late congressman’s daughter) and often invoke generational change as a rationale for their campaigns, hoping to appeal to a large swath of the Democratic electorate agitating for change in general.
But generational change, while not unwelcome, largely misses the point. Democrats’ anger at their party leaders escalated last year after the party’s worst presidential election performance since 2004, along with signs of yet another shift against the neoliberal policy consensus that paved the way for Donald Trump’s return to power and that has left millions of Americans impoverished and miserable. In June, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that four in five Democrats wanted the party to prioritize universal health care, affordable child care, and raising taxes on the rich. Later that month, the thirty-three-year-old Mamdani routed every opponent to his right in the New York City mayoral primary while emphasizing affordability, not his youth, as the central issue of his campaign.
Foxx, on the other hand, collapsed against Adelita Grijalva, who boasted endorsements from the same leading progressive figures and organizations that backed Mamdani and have long formed the nexus of antiestablishment energy on the American left. “Adelita understands that real change never comes from the top down. It comes from the bottom up. She is standing with working families in Southern Arizona and building a grassroots movement to take on the corporate greed that’s driving up the cost of everything,” Bernie Sanders said at a rally for Grijalva.
If Sanders wants voters to know that the most important kind of political change comes in the form of a candidate’s willingness to defy moneyed interests, an emerging crop of political aspirants, a supporting network of advocacy groups, and the media organizations covering their rise are pushing an entirely different message. Their emphasis is that age and length of time in office lie at the crux of the Democratic Party’s political woes. In advancing this narrative, the evangelists of youth are sidelining an alternative story, one in which the party’s decline is caused by servility to its corporate donor class and the replacement of its unionized, working-class base with a glittering constellation of white-shoe interest groups and nonprofits.
Sometimes advocates of generational change substitute youth for economic progressivism. At other times, they suggest that youth will necessarily be more progressive, eliding any analysis of the structural conditions that bring elected officials to heel in the interest of the rich, regardless of their age. They use spirited language to make their case. “[Younger generations] are looking to build a Democratic Party that will fight instead of fold,” Amanda Litman, leader of a PAC that recruits and funds young, progressive candidates, told the New York Times in April. Those candidates and their supporters, she said, are saying that “it’s time to pass the torch. And if they’re not going to pass it, we’re going to take it.”
Even when candidates are not explicitly highlighting contrasts in age, the innuendo is clear. “There has to be a way of both honoring the 49-year political career of someone like Jerry Nadler while asking him to build a bridge to the future,” the twenty-six-year-old Elkind told CNN shortly after he announced his candidacy in New York’s Twelfth Congressional District. The thirty-seven-year-old Rakov said in a Politico interview that incumbent Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) was out of touch with his constituents then specified that younger Democrats could better relate to Gen Z and millennial voters and navigate the 2025 media landscape to get the party’s message out. What that message entails or should entail, politically speaking, is often left unarticulated.
Wolves in Youth’s Clothing
In recent years, several older Democrats have stumbled in ways that are obviously the result of mental or physical slowdown in old age. Former President Joe Biden, of course, provoked widespread panic with his disastrous debate performance against Trump last year, leading to his historic ouster as the party’s nominee. Rep. David Scott (D-GA), who missed weeks of votes due to back issues, often appears frail and confused in his public appearances. The late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), then eighty-nine years old, spent most of early 2023 in a hospital due to shingles, encephalitis, and Ramsay Hunt syndrome. When she returned in a wheelchair, Feinstein told reporters that she had been present in the Senate and voting the whole time. She and others, including the elder Grijalva, have died in office, further winnowing Democratic numbers in their respective chambers.
Still others, like Sherman, are drawing criticism for their general reluctance to oppose Trump and his GOP allies in Congress. Young challengers and their backers have pinned this complacency on age too. This attribution obscures how complacency springs from its internal and external incentive structures, the party’s decades-long romance with neoliberalism and tepid bipartisanship, and those same youth candidates’ unwillingness to break from the very corporate actors responsible for propping up some of the incumbents they want to replace.
Elkind, the nonprofit leader whose primary challenge helped push Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) into retirement, won the backing of Bloomberg executive Daniel L. Doctoroff and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who last year urged Kamala Harris to fire Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan for her aggressive actions against large business mergers. And while Nadler endorsed Mamdani immediately after the primary, Elkind distanced himself from the mayoral nominee’s proposals to freeze rents for two million New Yorkers and introduce five government-run grocery stores to lower the prices of essential goods, despite their enduring appeal among the city’s struggling residents.
Hornedo, a thirty-four-year-old attorney seeking to oust Rep. André Carson (D-IN), seems to be following Foxx’s playbook of revealing as little as possible about his own policy positions, especially in public and media appearances. On the platform posted on his campaign website, Hornedo declares that he will “build a movement powered by people and driven by results,” essentially paraphrasing the first half of Sanders’s go-to campaign pitch but leaving out the part where American oligarchs, jealously guarding their capital, stand as the chief obstacles to any reforms a popular working-class movement might endeavor to pass. Hidden away at the bottom of the campaign website and yet standing out from his other content for its relative distance from the district he hopes to represent, is Hornedo’s stance on Israel, which includes a commitment to fund the Iron Dome, dispel hostile “caricatures” that portray Israel as “merely a military power,” and provide Israel with weapons under the oft-cited but unenforced condition that they align with humanitarian principles and minimize civilian harm. By contrast, Carson, a practicing Muslim, was one of a handful of Democrats who have consistently voted against resolutions providing Israel with billions of dollars’ worth of bombs, missiles, and other armaments used to commit genocide against Palestinians.
Hornedo’s positioning relative to the fifty-year-old Carson — who himself is pretty young by congressional standards — prompted speculation that he’s auditioning for an endorsement or at least tacit support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which recruits and dumps millions of dollars on behalf of pro-Israel candidates across the country. Still eight months out from the primary, AIPAC does not appear yet on Hornedo’s campaign filings, but concerns of this kind underscore the potential risk of younger candidates who tap into electoral ferment by latching onto its vaguest, most visible, and arguably least meaningful expression. After all, age did not predestinate the thirty-seven-year-old Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) or Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) to be standard-bearers of radical reform. (Though in all fairness, they did not run as insurgents either.)
A False and Real Spring
If Joe Kennedy III’s futile and utterly pointless 2020 bid for power against incumbent Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) — a Green New Deal champion backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — was an early test of this playbook’s viability, the lopsided result in Markey’s favor showed that it hardly fooled anyone. Foxx’s own defeat this summer appeared to provide emphatic confirmation of the theory that youth-based candidacies are no match for political ones. Nevertheless, the New York Times crowed that it was actually “Mamdani momentum” that withered in the deserts of southern Arizona.
Vague notions of passing the torch from old to young are now the cause du jour for centrist liberals. Little wonder: the youth narrative allows them to appear to be yielding to populist change-oriented energies while simultaneously eliding the value of economically progressive and democratic socialist political ideas. When disconnected from a popular pro-worker agenda, youth-based campaigns hijack more substantive demands for change and displace the role of economic populism in delivering that change. At best, they promote a flimsy generational affiliation in lieu of broad class consciousness. At worst, these campaigns are sometimes Trojan Horse threats against more genuinely progressive incumbents.
If a politician is no longer able to do their job effectively because of aging or a simple lack of will, whoever tries to replace them should at a minimum be able to distinguish themselves on more than just personal biography. They should be able to articulate what, exactly, they will be fighting for, and they should have an ambitious political platform and the organizing bona fides to back it up. Generational change is a false spring. Only a working-class movement and candidates who are committed to representing it offer real hope for a brighter day.