Federal records show a wide fundraising gap in Utah’s congressional race
BBC News US reporter James FitzGerald reported on Riley Owen, 27, one of the few Gen Z candidates from either party scheduled to run for Congress on 3 November. The report described Gen Z as people in their early teens to late 20s. Owen, a Republican, is running in a newly created Utah district that experts say may lean toward the Democrats. He was confirmed as his party’s candidate in Utah’s 1st congressional district, walking on stage to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and arguing that his generation needed to help renew the American Dream. Owen has championed paid maternity leave, restrictions on congressional stock trading and environmental action, issues that may appeal to Democratic supporters.
Federal Election Commission records showed the scale of the financial gap facing Owen. Ben McAdams, a 51-year-old Democrat who previously served in Congress, had a campaign that raised over $2.6m (£1.9m) by mid-October, compared with $150,000 raised by Owen. Owen calls money the big challenge in his race and says that money really talks in US politics. Research suggests campaign donors tend to prefer incumbent candidates. Despite McAdams’s larger war chest, Owen said he fancied his chances in Utah.
Owen calls the gerontocracy “a bipartisan issue” and says, “We’ve got people who have become career politicians, and they spend their lives in Congress.” He said the prevalence of career politicians indicated a system that was not delivering for Americans. Owen also argues that his generation is uniquely well placed to understand contemporary political issues, including those posed by technology. He disputes the suggestion that a younger candidate necessarily lacks relevant experience, pointing to his background as a military officer and White House policy analyst. “I think in politics, just like in industry, we need what’s called disruptive innovation,” he says.
Congress’s age profile stands apart from the median citizen
Pew Research Center analysis found that the average age of a House member was 58 and that of a senator was 65 at the start of the current Congress, while the median age of a US citizen is 39. Congressional records show that the median age of members has risen over time, with the lowest median ages in the House and Senate recorded in the early 1980s, at 48 and 52 respectively. Research from the Inter-Parliamentary Union says the US has one of the lowest proportions of lawmakers under 45 among comparable democracies.
Individual US states also have legislatures with their own Senate and House, and many current members of Congress spent years in state politics before running for a seat in Washington. Discussion of political age predates the current Congress: in 1984, Ronald Reagan, then 73 and the oldest US president, deflected scrutiny with a quip about Walter Mondale’s “youth and inexperience.” Mondale was 56. The BBC report characterized the United States as well known for its “gerontocracy,” a government ruled by people significantly older than most of the adult population, and reported that concern within both Republican and Democratic circles had renewed debate about age limits or health checks.
Hal Rogers, born in the 1930s, is among the longest-serving officeholders. The 88-year-old Republican is seeking his 24th term in the House from Kentucky’s 5th congressional district in November’s midterm elections. He has represented the district since 1981 and is the longest-serving member of the House. Rogers was elected on the same night Reagan won his first presidential term under the slogan “Let’s make America great again,” a phrase later revived by Donald Trump. One challenger Rogers beat for the Republican nomination this year was 60 years his junior. An image from 1996 shows Rogers with Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole.
Other senior figures demonstrate the age range at the top of US politics. President Donald Trump is 80; Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden left office at 82; Nancy Pelosi stepped down as the Democratic leader in the House at the same age; and Chuck Grassley, 93, is still a senator. Grassley entered politics in 1958, before Alaska and Hawaii were US states.
Attention has widened from age to health and acuity. Biden’s age became a major issue while he was in office and, to a lesser extent, Trump has faced questions too. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has drawn increasing attention after a months-long absence from Congress to undergo medical treatment. Democrat Maxine Waters, 88, faces a leadership challenge as the lead Democrat on the powerful House Financial Services Committee; some people consider her age a factor counting against her.
Participation and trust are among the explanations offered
The demographic profile of people who vote skews older, while the proportion of nonvoters who are young has increased. Pew found that 18- to 29-year-olds made up 25% of nonvoters in the 2020 US election and 30% four years later. In 2024, voters under 30 made up 20% of the voting-eligible population but only 15% of all the votes cast. Campaigners argue that these trends leave some issues underrepresented. Grace Mausser, co-chair of the New York City wing of the Democratic Socialists of America, said, “Yes, that might result in older people being elected, but I think it really skews, too, what issues are important; what issues politicians are incentivised to talk about and to take care of.”
Pew research from spring 2025 found that older people hold politicians in far higher esteem than younger people, even more so than in many other countries. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, 62% were likely to say that few or none of their elected officials were honest, compared with 45% of people over 50. Of the 25 countries surveyed, only Greece’s young adults had a more pessimistic view of the honesty of politicians. James Sloam of Royal Holloway, University of London, who studies political engagement on both sides of the Atlantic, said political disaffection among young people helps explain their unwillingness to participate.
Sloam said the shortage was not helped by congressional minimum-age requirements: candidates must be 30 to serve as a senator and 25 to serve as a representative. “The one leads to another,” he said, adding, “If you don’t have enough young people engaged in politics generally, then they won’t become representatives.” He also said young people in the US and UK recognize that power does not lie only in politics; they see other areas of work in which they can wield influence, including over elected officials.
The source cited America’s two-party system as another barrier to young people becoming involved in politics. Sloam said this was because the system represents a relatively narrow range of views, and he cited research indicating that young people are more energized by social movements or issue-based campaigns than by party politics. Mamdani and others on the political left appear to be galvanizing youth support outside the Democratic Party mainstream, but Sloam cautioned that this is “a little bit sporadic at the moment.”
The BBC report characterized the Republican Party as having splintered over the last decade with the advent of Trump’s MAGA movement, which appealed to a swathe of young men in the 2024 presidential election. Sloam said some European democracies show that a more pluralistic political environment can increase youth engagement. Scandinavian countries, he said, are more likely to be multi-party and provide a counterexample because their parties of government “work with those social movements to try and bring them into the political systems.” Citing countries such as Norway, Sloam suggested a cycle in which stronger youth turnout and trust in the political system lead to more involvement in politics.
Democratic socialist candidates draw younger supporters
The BBC report said some of the most vocal critics of the so-called gerontocracy had been candidates who identify as democratic socialists, meaning that their political views sit further to the left than the Democratic Party mainstream. These candidates tend to campaign heavily on the cost of living and other issues that cut through to Millennials and Gen Z, and their supporters skew younger.
Mausser campaigned for Zohran Mamdani in his winning bid last year to become, at 34, New York City’s youngest mayor since 1892. Mamdani was held up as a rare youthful success story, but Mausser said her concern was less about a politician’s age than that politician’s outlook. She said long tenure is not necessarily a problem; the problem can arise when someone becomes accustomed to the language and ideas of the political establishment. “You become so used to the language and the ideas of the political establishment that anything else - any new ideas, whether they come from young people or old people - seem crazy,” she said. Mausser invoked left-wing Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, 85, as an older politician with a long tenure on Capitol Hill who had embraced change and whose ideas had resonated across generations.
Parenthood raises unresolved questions for younger lawmakers
The BBC report asked whether young people who reach high-profile political positions can succeed, particularly when it comes to parenthood. Over the summer, the stories of two high-profile young women working in Washington raised fresh questions around the compatibility of political work and motherhood. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 37, a Democratic congresswoman who took office aged 29, announced that she had started the process of freezing her eggs. Later the same week in August, Karoline Leavitt, 29, who had been appointed the youngest-ever White House press secretary almost two years earlier, said she would leave the Trump administration to spend more time with her family, including her newborn baby. She explained: “I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy and attention required of [being] the White House press secretary.”
Only a handful of women have given birth while elected to Congress, while a few dozen lawmakers are mothers to children under 18. The federal government, like many US employers, does not offer paid parental leave. JD Vance, 42, one of the youngest vice-presidents in US history, recently acknowledged that having young children might affect his decision to run for the White House in 2028, saying: “We’ve got four little kids.”
Age alone does not determine political competence
Some experts argue that some lawmakers should know when to call it a day, while the BBC report said voters should not lose sight of the qualities of age or confuse age with competency. Tracey Gendron, a professor of gerontology at Virginia Commonwealth University whose research challenges the presumption that ageing is always linked to decline, said, “Age alone is a very poor predictor of anything.” She said, “You can have a 45-year-old who is experiencing depression or substance abuse who may not have the cognition necessary for the job,” and, equally, “You can have an 85-year-old with incredible integrity and political judgement and wisdom who is fully capable of doing the job.”
Gendron accepts that US politicians are not representative of the nation’s age profile and says this shows there are many ways in which Congress could diversify. “It’s funny when we call it a gerontocracy and we focus just on age alone,” she said. “When you look at most other aspects of representation - gender, sexuality, religion, race - we’re not representative there either.”
Owen argues for generational renewal across party lines
Among the issues that energize Owen as a Gen Z candidate, he identifies technology’s role in public life, immigration and cost-of-living concerns. “I’m on the front end of starting my own family and looking at the costs and [asking] how am I going to make it work?” he says. Asked about similarities between his campaign and young candidates on the opposite side of the political spectrum, he says: “I’d break down the ‘us versus them’ framework, and maybe discard that a little bit… [there is] a bipartisan message that a lot of Americans on both sides of the aisle are feeling: that Washington isn’t working for them.”
Owen takes a similar view to Mausser: voters should not necessarily select a candidate because the candidate is young; what matters is the candidate’s ideas. “For me, it’s much more about what you support, what you’re who you’re fighting for, than what year you were born,” Mausser says.