Both Republicans And Democrats Have an Age Problem

The New York Times ran a long feature earlier this month claiming that the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 has done little to inspire young people to run for office. The article had some strong reporting but did not cite much statistical evidence. So here’s a simple question: Is the U.S. Congress getting younger?

No. The trend in recent years has been toward an older Congress. It’s gotten no better — and maybe a bit worse — under Obama.

We collected data from a variety of sources, including GovTrack.us, the Sunlight Foundation and The New York Times’ Congress API, on members of Congress since 1947. (We’ve posted our data compilation here.) The people who represent us are considerably older than the population as a whole. The average member of the current 113th Congress was 57.6 years old as of the start of the term on Jan. 3, 2013. This is close to the all-time high of 57.8 years, which was achieved in the 111th Congress, which came into office with Obama in 2009. By contrast, the average age was 53.0 in January 1993, when Bill Clinton took office, and 49.5 when Ronald Reagan did in 1981.

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In that survey, respondents are given a number of ways to label themselves, from independents without any partisan disposition to “strong Democrat” and “strong Republican.” It turns out that older Americans are much more likely to identify as strong partisans. Just 10 percent of those aged 18 to 29 identified themselves as strong Democrats in the sample. But the frequency increased with age, topping out at 23 percent for those aged 80 and older. The tendency to identify oneself as a “strong Republican” also increased with age, although the slope of the curve is a little flatter. By contrast, the number of soft partisans — Americans who identified themselves as weakly affiliated with one of the major parties — decreased with age.



http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-democrats-have-an-age-problem