Washington-when the Republicans of the House of Representatives approved the package of taxes and billionaire expenses of President Donald Trump in a line vote of 215-214, some Democrats could not help noticing that three safe blue seats in their ranks were empty after those legislators recently died in their 70 years.
“Imagine if one of the oldest and most sick Democrats would have retired instead of dying in office and what would have meant for millions of people,” said Rebecca Katz, a consultant who has advised successful candidates of the Democratic Senate in two swing states in the last three years, in X.
Even when some Democrats admitted that the Republican bill may have ultimately passed, the moment quickly revived an intraparty debate about gerontocracy and politicians who cling to power, or seek promotions, while showing signs of decline or serious health problems. The clash has been promoted by a continuous calculation about the 2023 decision of then President Joe Biden to run for re -election before leaving after a disastrous debate in June 2024 in which the 81 -year -old holder struggled to prepare sentences.
The cascade of the events has reinforced a generational argument, once limited to a narrow group of progressive young people, which is now winning traction within the Democratic Party, even among the experienced operations of the party that say that the feeling is growing.
“They accuse you of ageism when you start having this conversation sometimes. But it’s like, look an actuarial table,” said Mike Nellis, a veteran Democratic strategist who has worked as an advisor to former Vice President Kamala Harris. “It is a fair criticism to say that we need people to leave. We need people to know when their time is to go at sunset.”
“And no, the debate will not disappear,” he said.
The clash is even evident within the ranks of the National Democratic Committee in the form of a recently elected vice president David Hogg, an outstanding 25 -year arms security activist who has asked the challenging legislators “out of contact” and “ineffective” through primary primary in solidly democratic seats.
“We have empowered the cruelty of the Republicans and we give them an enlarged majority because the elderly democratic leaders refused to resign. It is excessive,” Hogg told NBC News. “Politicians only respond to incentives. That means we need to create a set of dynamics where they decide that it is the best for their interest to retire, and that includes the primary.”
Two Republicans lost the vote early Thursday, and if they had voted, three additional democratic votes could have fought a draw, blocking the bill, at least at that time. The Republican party would have had to win the votes of a member who voted “present” or turned to one of the two who voted “no” in the bill.
Hogg speculated that Republicans would probably “have discovered a way to pass it if it failed” due to a tie vote. But he said it is no excuse for Democrats to facilitate their task.
“However, it is undeniable that with less democratic members it gives Trump a greater capacity to approve what he wants through Congress. And this never had to happen,” said Hogg, and added that it is “unacceptable” when the Democrats spend dozens of millions of dollars to gain swing districts, but not do “nothing for sickness, older members to go down and then lose seats and then lose seats.”
One of the three vacancies was Virginia’s headquarters, previously, representative Gerry Connolly, who announced two days after winning re -election in November 2024 that had diagnosed the esophagus cancer; He was soon chosen by Democrats to be the classification member in the Supervision Committee. He died on May 21 at 75. Another was the representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat of Arizona, who died at 77 two months after the treatment for lung cancer, a diagnosis he announced in April 2024, before winning the re -election for the last time. The third was the representative Sylvester Turner, D-Texas, who died of a medical emergency in March at age 70, after fighting previously in bone cancer.
“The fact that the margin was so close makes it so frustrating. Millions of people will lose their medical attention,” said Amanda Litman, the president of the group who postulates for something and author of “When we we affate: The Next Generation Guide to Leadership.”
Litman and others point out that they are not asking that legislators be automatically expelled after a certain age, but they want to see them face external challenges and pressure to demonstrate why they should continue serving.
“We are protecting a system that has an antiquity and privileged law about effectiveness,” he said, added: “The system that protected Joe Biden and the system that protects our elected officials in Congress is the same,” describes it as a mixture of the egos of politicians and the consumption of personnel and the operations of the party that should know better.
Litman responded to critics who say that Democrats should focus on blaming Republicans instead of converting their anger, saying that Biden’s re -election effort and the problems in the camera taught him that the party will not evolve without pressure.
“This conversation has to happen in public, because we have now seen that it is not happening in private,” he said.
Ashwani Jain, a former 35 -year -old Obama Administration official and candidate for 2024 representatives without success, said the Democratic Party is “too focused on protecting the old guard, underpinning aged politicians while leaving aside the next generation of leaders.”
“The establishment clings to a model that prioritizes antiquity, fundraising and internal connections on new ideas and basic energy,” said Jain, who wrote the new book “Project 2027: a progressive plan to claim Congress and protect democracy.”
“It’s not about ageism, it’s about urgency,” he said.
Another factor that drives conversation is the generalized belief in both parties that domestic majorities are probable to be close in the predictable future, which means that each seat can have national consequences.
“Members often continue to function for the right reasons, there are always pending issues in the public service, but continuing with important diseases leads to painful purposes for the careers,” said Ashley Schapitl, former main commissioner of the Democratic senators and the treasure department. “The margins of Congress have been adjusted since the 2020 elections, making each seat more than in previous years to determine the results of the legislative fights that have monumental consequences for the American people.”
Nellis said that major politicians eventually become “out of the way culturally” and, when refusing to resign, they are “avoiding future leaders to denounce, and create a cascade problem” when freezing opportunities on the stairs. He said that generational change would also mitigate the political struggles of the party to communicate in modern media.
“We have many leaders who are very intelligent, they care passionately about problems, but they can’t do the media that we need them,” Nellis said. “And at this time, what I need is many more politicians who can sit in the podcast for three hours and talk about a lot of problems and get into strange and silly personal things and sit with Joe Rogan. And I don’t have many of those.”
They are not just politicians, he added.
“There is a problem of generational change throughout the Democratic Party,” Nellis said, asking for new consultants, campaign managers, communicators and substitutes, in addition to the new legislators. “So the change of generation: it is actively happening within the Democratic Party at all levels.”
