Can America Get Out of the Gerontocracy Trap?
“We have a sclerotic gerontocracy,” posted 48-year-old Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) in December. Khanna’s outburst on X was provoked by the revelation that an 81-year-old Rep. Kay Granger (R–Texas), who had been absent from Congress for months, had in fact been diagnosed with dementia and was residing in a memory care facility.
“I’m more concerned about the congressmen who have dementia and are still voting,” joked a 53-year-old Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.). Only a year earlier Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), who had long been failing in health and mental acuity, died in office at age 90.
At its simplest, gerontocracy means rule by the elderly. President Joe Biden’s dodderingly disastrous debate in June floodlighted for many Americans just how sclerotic our governing institutions have become. Notably, President Donald Trump, at 78, is the oldest person ever elected to the office. (Biden was a close second at 77 when he won the election in 2020.) That’s slightly more than double the U.S. population’s median age of 38.9.
Current octogenarian congressional leaders include Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who was 82 when she stepped down as speaker of the House, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), who was 82 when he resigned as Senate minority leader. The 91-year-old Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), currently serving as president pro tempore of the Senate, is third in the line of presidential succession.
Granger and Feinstein were outliers on Capitol Hill, but not by as much as one might think. The median age of members of the House of Representatives now stands at 58.6, while the Senate’s median age stands at 63.3. “From 1919 to 1999, the median senator never eclipsed 60 years old and the median representative never surpassed 55,” Geoffrey Skelley noted on FiveThirtyEight in 2023. As recently as the early 1980s, the median ages for the House and Senate were 48.4 and 51.7 years, respectively.
The House is the third-oldest lower legislative chamber in the world, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. At 66.5 and 60.3 years, respectively, only Cambodia’s National Assembly and Palau’s House of Delegates are older. The U.S. Senate is the oldest directly elected upper legislative chamber in the world.
In other words, the most powerful people in the United States are, on average, as old as dirt. And to quote the playwright David Mamet, “Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.” An aging elite disconnected from society’s evolving needs will slow growth and hinder innovation in dangerous ways. Is there any way out of the gerontocracy trap?
The Longevity Transition
First came the demographic transition, in the early 20th century, when increasingly wealthy and healthy populations moved from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates. Global average life expectancy at birth increased from 32 in 1900 to 73 today, largely because infant mortality rates were greatly reduced.
As the 20th century progressed, the demographic transition gave way to the longevity transition. “Whereas previous gains had been driven mainly by people aged younger than 60 years, improvements in life expectancy started to increasingly involve older people,” explained London Business School professor Andrew Scott in The Lancet‘s 2021 special issue on healthy longevity. In 1950, life expectancy for American men and women who had reached age 65 was 13.1 and 16.2 more years, respectively. By 2024, that had risen to 19.6 and 21.7 years.
Are our politicians living to older ages simply because we all are? For a long time, that seemed to be true. Politicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries didn’t generally live any longer than their constituents did, according to a 2022 study in the European Journal of Epidemiology that compared the mortality rate and life expectancy at age 45 of nearly 58,000 politicians from 11 countries, including the United States.
But as the 20th century advanced, politicians’ lifespans began to pull away from those of their fellow citizens. Now American politicians in that cohort have substantially longer life expectancies than their countrymen—an extra 7.8 years. (For what it is worth, Social Security Administration life tables suggest that the life expectancies of Trump and Biden are nine and seven more years, respectively.)
Greater wealth correlates with longer lives. The median net worth of members of Congress was just over $1 million in 2020, whereas for American households it stands at around $193,000. Social connections are a significant factor in longevity too. Successful politicians tend to be naturally gregarious. Once elected, the incumbency advantage—that is, name recognition and established fundraising networks—enables politicians to age in place by outcompeting younger challengers.
Perhaps the fact that our politicians are getting older simply reflects Americans’ preferences for seasoned leaders. After all, the median age of the American population has risen from 28.1 in 1970 to 38.9. But a 2023 Pew Research poll asking respondents about the ideal age for U.S. president found that 24 percent think it is best for a president to be in their 60s and only 3 percent think their 70s is best. Younger Americans prefer younger presidents, but even among people in their 70s, only 5 percent say they think it’s best for presidents to be in their 70s or older.
Nearly 80 percent of both younger and older Americans favor maximum age limits on federal elected officials, according to Pew. Those findings are echoed by an October 2023 USA Today/Suffolk University poll, which reported that 63 percent of respondents favored setting a maximum age limit on Congress.
Limits on the terms of legislators have been adopted in 16 states so far. Voters in North Dakota in June overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that bars people from running or serving in the U.S. House or Senate if they are to turn 81 during their term.
If voters so overwhelmingly prefer younger candidates, why are they underrepresented in politics? To answer this question, two Harvard researchers analyzed the results of 16 different candidate choice experiments in seven democracies. In their 2022 article in The Journal of Politics, they report, “Almost universally, the oldest candidate is viewed less favorably on average compared to the younge
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