Sen. Chuck Schumer’s sudden decision Thursday to support a Republican-written bill to avert a government shutdown so enraged his fellow Democrats that some were already talking about primary challenges to the 74-year-old Democratic leader from New York.
The eruption of anger about Schumer’s seeming surrender thrust into public view a generational divide that has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest and most consequential rifts.
Younger Democrats are chafing at and increasingly complaining about what they see as the feebleness of the old guard’s efforts to push back against President Donald Trump. They are second-guessing how the party’s leaders — like Schumer, who brandishes his flip phone as a point of pride — are communicating their message in the TikTok era as Republicans dominate the digital town square.
And they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming.
In other words, the younger generation is done with deference.
Some who argue for more militancy in opposing Trump say the party’s elders tend to be less comfortable with the type of unbending political warfare that is called for.
“Our party needs more of a fighting spirit,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio, a 40-year-old from outside Pittsburgh. “This is not a normal administration, and they’re willing to do dangerous things.”
The split is “not solely along generational lines,” he said. “But I do think the newer, younger members maybe get this intuitively.”
Deluzio said that Democrats elected before the Trump era tended to be shaped by fond recollections of comity and camaraderie across the aisle. “Those of us who are a little younger or have come to the Congress more recently, we don’t have the experience of some days of yore where things were more functional and the parties all got along,” he said.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who burst onto the political scene by slaying a giant of the party in a 2018 primary challenge, pointedly declined to shoot down a question about a future primary against Schumer, who is not on the ballot again until 2028. Interviewed on CNN on Thursday, she called his turnabout on the legislation — which every Democrat in the House save one opposed — a “tremendous mistake” and urged him to reverse himself.
Each younger lawmaker’s prescriptions for the party may be different. But many of them speak of an imperative to fight and to act. Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, 37, said Democrats needed an ambitious strategy to address educational deficits caused by the coronavirus pandemic, promote housing construction and take on social media corporations that are fraying the social fabric.
“I’m interested in ideas. Do we have big ideas for how we’re going to govern better than Trump?” he said. “Younger lawmakers have that sense of urgency and ferocity.”
That urgency is also driving younger Democrats to try to usher their elders out of the way. Some older House Democrats have already been pushed out of key congressional posts. Younger primary challengers are laying the groundwork to try to oust more senior lawmakers from office entirely, with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 84, among those targeted.
And in private, 30- and 40-something lawmakers commiserate about having to decipher the mysteries of the internet for their older colleagues; one said she recently had to explain to another House member what a podcast was.
“The generation that got us to this point does not have the skills or stomach to get us to the next point,” said Amanda Litman, who leads Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits younger and more diverse Democrats to seek local office.
Litman said she had already heard from at least half a dozen young people — more than ever, she said — who are plotting congressional primary challenges in 2026.
“I would not be surprised to see, if not quite a Tea Party equivalent, a wave of challengers against old Democratic incumbents in particular,” Litman said. “It is not going to be ideological. It’s going to be style.”
A Biden hangover
A party that fatefully banked its fortunes in 2024 on an 81-year-old standard-bearer now sees reminders everywhere of the perils of relying on older leaders:
Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., 76, freezing for more than a minute last month after suffering a “complex partial seizure” on the House floor.
Schumer and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., 86, chanting, “We will win!” in a demonstration that inspired little besides eye rolls and cringes among younger Democrats.
Or Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, 77, waving his cane at Trump during the president’s address to a joint session of Congress. (“If the Democrats want a 77-year-old congressman to be the face of their resistance, heckling the president, then bring it on,” Speaker Mike Johnson, the chamber’s top Republican, chortled a day later.)
“It hangs a shadow over everything,” Tyson Brody, a Democratic strategist, said of the age issue. “And it becomes a very neat explanation for why we lost and what needs to be fixed that people of all ideologies can get behind. It’s a shortcut for ‘How do we rebrand Democrats?’”
Age, of course, is an imperfect way to measure all the varied Democratic disagreements.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., 83, has been barnstorming battleground states and drawing large crowds of young people as he makes his populist economic case against the Republicans.
And in the spending fight, all but one Democrat in the House — spanning every ideological wing — voted to keep up the battle.
James Carville, 80, who became a lightning rod for suggesting the party “roll over and play dead” and let Trump overreach, told a closed-door retreat of House Democrats on Thursday that fighting now was fine, up to a point.
“No one is going to care how hard you fight in March of 2025,” Carville said Friday. “It’s how you win” in 2026, he added.
On Thursday, Schumer explained his decision to vote to keep the government open in an opinion piece in The New York Times, a version of which he read on the Senate floor.
“As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be, I believe a government shutdown is far worse,” Schumer wrote.
A group of newer Democratic senators have disagreed with his approach, including Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., 48, whom Schumer had pushed to deliver his party’s response to Trump’s congressional address this month.
Neither party has a monopoly on the gerontocracy: Sen. Mitch McConnell, 83, the former Republican leader, recently announced he would not seek reelection. In December, former Rep. Kay Granger, 82, R-Texas, was discovered to be residing in a senior living facility while still in office. And there is Trump, 78, who became the oldest person ever inaugurated as president.
Still, it is chiefly the Democrats who are grappling with the age issue, heading into the 2026 midterms with several 70-plus senators — Dick Durbin of Illinois (80), Ed Markey of Massachusetts (78), Jack Reed of Rhode Island (75) — either running for reelection or not yet ruling it out.
David Hogg, a 24-year-old recently elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee who has said since the election that Biden should not have run in 2024, said Democrats needed a youth movement.
“This is not to say that we don’t need experienced people in the party. We absolutely do,” Hogg said. “But for God’s sake, we really need some younger leaders, too.”
A survivor of the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting who built a national profile speaking out against gun violence, Hogg said the Democrats were especially wanting for leaders capable of exploiting the media landscape as “the asset that it is” rather than “managing it as the liability it has become for many people in our party.”
“We only have one Gen Z member of Congress that has been elected in the last two elections,” he said, alluding to Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., 28. “That’s insane.”
Indeed, younger Democrats tend to communicate with voters in ways that are more authentically online.
Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., 36 — who said she recently had to explain what a podcast was to a Democratic colleague she would not name — has started posting “get ready with me” videos on Instagram discussing complex policy issues while applying makeup.
“Democrats won the people who watch cable news and read newspapers,” Jacobs said. “We lost the people who don’t feel like they’re part of politics at all. And so how do we go to them instead of keep trying to force them to come to us?”
‘Old versus
the young’
The frustrations of younger House Democrats boiled over even before Trump took office, when three of them successfully challenged older, more senior colleagues for the posts of ranking member on the powerful Judiciary, Agriculture and Natural Resources committees.
Of course, youth is relative in Congress: The top Democrat on Judiciary is now 62 instead of 77. And one of the ousted Democrats, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona, died Thursday.
A fourth House Democrat, Ocasio-Cortez, 35, lost her bid to lead Democrats on the Oversight Committee to Gerry Connolly of Virginia, 74, a month after he said he was battling esophageal cancer.
Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., 42, who gave a nominating speech for Ocasio-Cortez, recalled that he had told his colleagues that while they did not agree on everything ideologically, she was the type of “fighter” the party needed now.
Ryan said the biggest factor in a lawmaker’s effectiveness was not age but length of service in Washington, with newer lawmakers more willing to take risks and able to present themselves fully and authentically.
“If you came up in the old world where you rose in the ranks slowly and carefully, that sort of gets almost trained out of you,” Ryan said. “Whereas if you came in post-Trump, you were really catalyzed by a lot of that rawness and emotion.”
Newer lawmakers are comparing notes, among other ways, through a text chain limited to House Democrats who have served five terms or fewer.
One incumbent Democrat who could face a 2026 challenger is Rep. Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, 69, who took office in 2001. After a woman pressed him at a Boston event last month to be more assertive against Trump, saying doing so was in the nation’s best interest, Lynch pushed back.
“I get to decide that,” Lynch said, repeating the phrase four times. “You want to decide that? You need to run for Congress.”
Among those who saw the exchange was Patrick Roath, 38, a lawyer and onetime aide to former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, who said in an interview that he was considering a primary run against Lynch.
“It’s not an age thing explicitly,” Roath said. “But these jobs, they’re not meant to be held for decades.”
One declared challenger is Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez, who is running against Pelosi in San Francisco.
“We’re in this crisis moment, and you’re seeing the seniority model of the Democratic Party falling apart,” Chakrabarti said.
The Democratic old guard, he argued, understands neither the depth of the nation’s troubles nor how intractable Republicans have become in solving them.
Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 shocking upset of a senior House Democrat was “painted as left versus center,” he said. “It’s not that anymore. It’s change versus status quo now. It’s old versus the young.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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