The Dark Reason More Young People Aren’t Running for Office

This was supposed to be Gen Z’s year. What happened?

By Shirin Ali | Slate Magazine

It was not so long ago that millennials were the youngest generation getting elected to public office and infiltrating the halls of power. Now, Gen Z is fast on their heels. Across the country this year, young twentysomethings have campaigned for state and federal office, in some cases against candidates more than twice their age.

But in an election cycle flooded with historical amounts of money, it hasn’t been an easy time to break in.

Cheyenne Hunt, a 26-year-old law school graduate, ran for Congress in California’s 45^thDistrict but lost in the Democratic primary. She said that undoubtably the biggest challenge she faced in her race was fundraising. “For so many young people, we just looked at the status quo and realized we couldn’t afford to wait our turn,” Hunt told me over the phone recently. “Too much was at stake, too many issues that were existential.” She ran on a platform of reproductive rights, addressing climate change, and creating more economic opportunities for young people.

Hunt, like so many of the other Gen Z candidates this year, is best described as extremely driven: Before running for office, she worked at the United Nations in the office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and was a law clerk in Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office, where she said she got to work on Trump’s first impeachment trial. Her primary race was against six other Democratic candidates in a district that encompasses parts of Los Angeles and Orange County, challenging the 69-year-old Republican incumbent Michelle Steel.

Hunt said she struggled from the onset, with people questioning her qualifications at every turn and suggesting she was too young to understand her constituents’ needs. But “the thing that deeply disturbed me about this system, there’s a reason why almost everyone in Congress looks the same, comes from the same background, is from the same socioeconomic status,” Hunt said. “It’s because those people are in a situation to fundraise easily and from a personal network.”

Averie Bishop, a 28-year-old law school graduate running as a Democrat for the Texas House in a district that encompasses part of Dallas, echoed that sentiment. At first, Bishop said, she thought her age would be the biggest hindrance to her candidacy, but she found that people were open to hearing her out and could sense her passion. What’s been a profoundly bigger challenge has been the cost of running a political campaign. “I have been running for office for the past year, and learning what I know now, I am so disenchanted by the bureaucracy of politics,” Bishop said. In Texas, there are no campaign contribution limits for state House races. So despite her rising profile—Bishop was winner of the 2022 Miss Texas pageant and has a gigantic following on TikTok—she is still working full time as a technology consultant. Her campaign salary couldn’t cover the costs of running for office.

Bishop remains undeterred. “It was mostly my dad that influenced me to run for office,” she told me over a Zoom call. “When I was 17 or 18 years old, he decided to run for mayor of McKinney, Texas, despite not having any money, maybe $200 in his checking account, and no college education.” Her dad was a school bus driver and ran on securing better benefits for public school teachers, bus drivers, and students. He lost the race, but his courage inspired Bishop to run on a unapologetically progressive platform—restoring reproductive rights, reforming student debt, and securing better funding for public schools—and to take on the incumbent, Angie Button, a 70-year-old Republican who has held her district since 2009.

Young candidates like Bishop don’t have vast campaign networks to tap into; they are also not the types of candidates who attract deep-pocketed super PACs. This has always been the case, but the barrier to entry has gotten substantially higher with each election cycle since 2010, when the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for unlimited political spending in Citizens United. In 2024, candidates running in federal House and Senate races (as well as their various backers) have collectively spent $10 billion, according to OpenSecrets; by the end of all this, 2024 will probably top 2020, which cost $14 billion, as the most expensive election cycle in U.S. history.

“The reality is, when you’re young, in your 20s and running for office, you can’t depend on your friends to give you money, because they’re just out of college,” Ashwin Ramaswami, a 25-year-old candidate from Georgia, told me.

A graduate of Stanford University and Georgetown Law, Ramaswami used to work in cybersecurity for the federal government and is now running in one of the only competitive state Senate races in Georgia, in a district that Trump carried by 3 percentage points and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock narrowly won in 2020. When he started his campaign, Ramaswami said he was told he would need to raise up to $1 million to be competitive. He told me in October that he had raised over $700,000, but it took blood, sweat, and tears to get there.

“You have to build connections and connect with people who are already at the apex of their careers,” he said, calling the race to get boatloads of cash “an exercise in bridge-building.” Despite bringing in an impressive amount for a first-time candidate in a statewide race, Ramaswami said that the super PACs supporting his opponent are dumping $250,000 a month into the race. That’s a level of spend he just can’t compete with.

Ramaswami’s opponent is Republican state Sen. Shawn Still, who was indicted with Donald Trump in the Georgia election interference case. Ramaswami has handed out flyers with Still’s mug shot, calling the state senator “wrong for Georgia.” Still has attacked his 25-year-old opponent for his age, dinging him for living with his parents. “There’s a huge contrast here between someone like me, who represents the future and can really bring our community forward, versus criminals and corrupt people,” Ramaswami said.

Currently, there’s only one Gen Z candidate in Congress, the Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost. Nearly all of the Gen Z candidates who were running for federal office this year either lost their primary or dropped out, but many who are running for state office have managed to stay in their races. (Future Caucus, a nonprofit that works to get young people to run for office, found that younger candidates were disproportionately eliminated from their races in 2024.)

The inability of Gen Z candidates to break in is reflective of a new trend where people are generally not retiring as early as they once did, said Patrick Fisher, a political science professor at Seton Hall University. “It’s kind of like the baby boomers are hogging political positions,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a lack of experience that is the barrier for young candidates. I really believe it’s more in the line of fundraising and name recognition,” Rachel Janfaza, an expert on youth voter culture and founder of the newsletter the Up and Up, told me. But having fewer young people on the ballot makes it harder to activate and engage young voters, she said. In listening sessions across the country, Janfaza has repeatedly heard young people say they don’t feel like they identify with a specific political party, and that’s driven by the fact that “they don’t see people in politics who look like and sound like and talk like them.”

That will eventually change—even if the cost of campaigns and the amount of outside spending continues to tick upward. (All three Gen Zers Slate interviewed said they wanted to prioritize campaign finance reform to rein in dark money spending.) Generational change is, after all, inevitable.

When these young candidates do eventually start breaking through, they will face a whole other set of financial challenges because of what it costs to actually be a legislator. Bishop said that even if she wins, she may not be able to afford rent in Austin, “let alone afford the rent I have to have here in the district to maintain my eligibility to be a state representative,” she said. “These are all infrastructure challenges and barriers that keep young people out of office.”