Democrats face growing calls for generational change

Calls for generational change among Democrats are growing louder as the party seeks to chart a path forward going into the 2026 midterms.  

On Wednesday, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair David Hogg’s group Leaders We Deserve PAC launched a $20 million effort aimed at primarying House Democratic incumbents in safe seats in hopes of electing younger candidates. A number of young progressive candidates have already launched primary bids against longtime incumbent House Democrats.  

The efforts come as young, progressive figures in the party like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are playing a central role in galvanizing the party’s grassroots in large-scale rallies across the country.  

“The Democratic Party says over and over again ‘we have to care about democracy, we have to care about democracy,’ and we do,” Hogg said in an interview with The Hill. “But the best way to do that is not just to say we need to care about democracy, it is to use democracy to actively help people improve their lives and show them how democracy is the best vehicle to do that.”  

Grassroots anger has bubbled up against the Democratic establishment’s response to Trump during his first three months in office, reaching a fever pitch earlier this month when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and a handful of other Democrats voted with Republicans to pass a House GOP-drafted budget resolution. The development further sparked speculation of a potential Senate primary battle between Schumer and Ocasio-Cortez.  

“The leadership part is what you do around the procedural part to have a conversation with the public about who we are and who we want to be,” said Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Senate candidate in Michigan. “There’s a lot more you can do when you embrace the leadership part of the job and you’re seeing leaders do that, folks like Sen. Sanders and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez.”  

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders appear to be resonating with swaths of voters and activists looking for new messaging in Trump’s second administration. In addition to attracting massive crowds at their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have seen massive grassroots fundraising hauls in the off-year cycle. Ocasio-Cortez’s team said she raised more than $9.5 million from 260,000 individual donors, with an average donation of $21. Sanders’s team said he raised $11.5 million in the first quarter of the year.  

Young voters’ approval of Trump has fallen since the start of his term, according to YouGov polling, from a net positive 5 percent to a net negative 29 percent as of early April. But Democrats broadly have logged dismal approval ratings in recent weeks, with just 30 percent of voters under 35 viewing the party favorably, per March CNN polling.

Frustration with the status quo has also fueled at least four younger primary opponents to challenge long-serving House lawmakers in recent weeks, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who’s facing a challenge from Saikat Chakrabarti, a veteran of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2016 campaign and a former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez.  

Chakrabarti stressed his “respect” for Pelosi’s long career in Washington as he launched his bid, but argued it’s “a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics 45 years ago.”

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) also faces a challenge from his onetime deputy press secretary on Capitol Hill, Jake Rakov, who’s pitched his campaign as a “generational, operational difference” from his ex-boss.

And in Illinois, 26-year-old social media influencer Kat Abughazaleh kickstarted her challenge to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D) by underscoring that “half of Congress are millionaires and people born before the Moon landing.”

“The bigger issue is the lack of different lived experiences in Congress,” Abughazaleh told The Hill. “The average age of Congress is 58. The average American is 38. Most of Congress didn’t grow up with school shooter drills. They don’t worry about out-of-pocket medical costs. They don’t spend most of their paycheck on rent. They probably own their home, actually.”  

“We need to make room for people who do know what it’s like to live with the problems that Americans face every day,” she continued, adding that she does not have health insurance.  

With Democrats in the minority in both chambers of Congress, many of the party’s lawmakers are trying to figure how they can resist Republicans and fight back. Abughazaleh pointed Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s (D-Md.) trip to El Salvador this week to check in on the wellbeing of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration to the country.  

“That should have been every Democrats’ first instinct,” Abughazaleh said. “And yet many of them are still quibbling on what we should do.”

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, whose clients include Ocasio-Cortez, said there’s a huge appetite among the party for candidates willing to fight back.

“I think it's interesting, both older and younger voters are just really interested in seeing a different kind of stand-up-and-fighting style that tends to be associated with younger candidates, new ideas, bold vision, and, you know, a rejection of kind of the status quo in both parties,” she said.  

“I think the plummeting of support and turnout among young voters was a real factor in adding energy to this,” she added.

Indeed, Democrats saw a drop-off in their support among younger voters between 2020 and 2024 in the presidential election. In 2020, former President Biden won 18- to 29-year-olds with 60 percent of the vote, including 65 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds specifically, according to CNN exit polling. In 2024, former Vice President Harris received 54 percent of the vote among 18- to 29-year-olds, including 54 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds.  

Both candidates fared similarly among 30- to 44-year-olds; Biden received 52 percent of the cohort’s vote in 2020 while Harris received 51 percent.

“It's not to say that there aren't older leaders who can meet the moment,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, a progressive group aimed at recruiting and supporting younger candidates. She pointed to Sanders, Van Hollen and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).  

But the Democratic figures that have best resonated with voters are generally “either quite literally younger" or have a younger “political age” in terms of when they rose to party prominence, Litman said. “That, I think, really changes your understanding of both the attention ecosystem and the opponent.”

Run for Something has seen over 40,000 sign-ups since November from young people thinking about running for office, Litman told The Hill, more than during the first two years of Trump’s first term.

Young people in politics generally care for “personality and policy” over age or party, said Rachel Janfaza, founder of young voter-focused newsletter The Up and Up. They want candidates who meet them where they are, from the issues they prioritize to the platforms they use.  

But some of the people best positioned to do that may well be newer, younger faces.  

“You hear sort of the same ethos for all of these [younger candidates], where it's like they feel like they've been growing up one crisis after another, and that's how young people across the country feel,” said Janfaza of the young progressive challenger campaigns that have grabbed recent headlines.  

“And instead of waiting for their turn, so to speak, or waiting for someone else to fix the problems that are affecting their daily lives, they're like, ‘I'm going to just do it myself.'"  

As Democrats seek to grow their numbers on Capitol Hill, though, talk of primaries has raised concerns. The challengers against Pelosi, Sherman and Schakowsky all notably hail from comfortably blue districts, but some worry tough primaries could wound incumbents or pull resources from riskier districts — prompting Hogg to clarify on X that his group “will NOT be supporting young people attempting to primary Frontline Democratic incumbents."

“We have to do it all: We have to both win the House and flip the Senate, but we also have to change what the Democratic Party is, and the way that we do that is through competitive primaries,” Litman said.  

“We should not be afraid of a primary. Primaries are how we decide what we as a party believe, and no matter what happens in them at the end of 2026, the Democratic Party is going to look and feel very different because of those primaries.”