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
Auteur: Nicholas Liu
