Democrats are not OK with Boomers

Perhaps having learned their lesson with Joe Biden, the party’s voters are starting to reject older, establishment-bound candidates.

Maine Governor Janet Mills at a meeting at the White House in 2025. Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Next Comedy Cellar show with Clare and Galen

Just a short, unplanned newsletter today, but I wanted to let you know that my next show at the Comedy Cellar with Galen Druke and Clare Malone is set for May 13. These have always been a lot of fun and you can buy tickets here.

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Janet Mills, the 78-year-old governor of Maine, lost the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate today. Instead, the nominee is all but certain to be Graham Platner, a 41-year-old oyster fisherman from the tiny town of Sullivan¹, known for his progressive politics and poor tattoo choices, who had never run for elected office before.

Officially, this won’t go down in the record books as an “L” for Mills; instead, she announced today that she was suspending her campaign. But unless there are key facts that haven’t been reported yet, this was mostly a face-saving measure: she dropped out because she was going to lose. Mills trailed Platner by about 30 points in recent polls and had shown no signs of forward progress. She was also performing worse than Platner in polling for the projected November matchup against Susan Collins. I said this after Joe Biden dropped out too, so I want to be consistent: if you quit because you don’t think you can win, that should count as an “at-bat”, a shot on goal that didn’t hit the target.

If she had defeated both Platner and Collins, Mills would have been the oldest first-term senator. But did that really make a difference in the nation’s oldest state? Maybe that’s not giving enough credit to Platner, for instance, whose rough edges and outsider-ness seems to be regarded by Mainers as a feature rather than a bug.

Well, maybe. I looked up the current ages (as of Apr. 30) of Democratic candidates in Senate races that most analysts consider “competitive”. In many cases, the primaries have not happened yet, so I listed all candidates in these races who seem to have a viable shot at the nomination: this included three candidates in Michigan, and two each in Iowa and Minnesota.

Then I compared the ages of this year’s crop of Democrats to the last time Democrats ran against Trump in a midterm in 2018, based on their ages as of Apr. 30, 2018. Independent candidates who are de facto Democrats are included.

That’s a bigger difference than I was expecting! The median age of Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races has dropped from 63 to 45.5.

Part of that is because a far greater number of incumbent Democrats faced difficult races in 2018, mostly red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin left over from a less partisan era. Georgia’s Jon Ossoff is really the only incumbent Democrat facing a tough race this year (and it might not be that tough). There are some other potentially competitive D-held seats (Michigan, New Hampshire and arguably Minnesota) this year, but Democratic incumbents are retiring in each of them. Still, even excluding incumbents, the average age of Democratic nominees has dropped from 57 to 48.

Of course, it’s hard to separate out age from establishment-ness, and they’re frequently correlated. In New York City, where Zohran Mamdani’s primary win was another sign of generational turnover, being literally half of Andrew Cuomo’s age helped to accentuate the contrasts.

And the Democratic electorate does seem to retain a pragmatic streak. Former governor Roy Cooper, age 68, won the Democratic nomination in North Carolina essentially uncontested. Sherrod Brown, the former U.S. Senator, is 73 years old and all but certain to be the Democratic nominee in Ohio. However, both Cooper and Brown are A-list recruits, probably the strongest candidates Democrats could have chosen in those races.

It’s less clear whether Mills or Platner would have had a better chance to defeat Collins. As much as we like our polling here at Silver Bulletin, there’s a long way to go until November. Platner’s past writings include many things that might offend conservatives as well as liberals, and Collins notoriously outperformed her polling in 2020.

Still, in ranking prospective Democratic candidates for 2028, this should probably be considered a favorable sign for candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (36), Ossoff (39), Pete Buttigieg (44), and Ruben Gallego (46). Anyone Boomer or Boomer-adjacent is being regarded with increasing suspicion, by contrast.

1. I know Sullivan oddly well! It’s where my grandma designed a home and spent much of her time.