Congress is older than the voters it answers to, and those voters skew old too

What was said

The quotations come from the segment’s transcript.^[1][29] Obama spoke at Salem State University in Massachusetts on Monday 21 September; the university had said media would not be admitted to the venue, and the clip aired on Psaki’s program the next night.^[2][3] He has made the argument before: in London in September 2025 he said “80 percent of the world’s problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance.”^[4]

The reader who sent us this asked three questions: how the age of Congress compares with the age of voters, whether older members understand what their constituents want, and whether they care or follow their own agenda. The first can be measured. The second can be tested indirectly, through what lawmakers of different ages do. The third asks about motive, and we say below what the evidence can and cannot show.

Verdicts at a glance

• Mostly True

  Obama: “One of the challenges we face globally is old men clinging to power”

  The median national leader is 63, only 1 in 7 countries is led by a woman, and 7 of the 10 oldest leaders run countries rated “not free.” His explanation, fear of “irrelevance and death,” is opinion and not rated.

• Mostly True

  Congress is much older than the people it represents

  The Senate’s median age is 12.4 years above the median 2024 voter and 16.9 above the median adult. Measured against people old enough to serve, the House gap falls to 2.6 to 4.7 years.

• True

  Moore: young people feel they are “not being seen” or “heard”

  In an AlphaROC survey reported by NPR, more than 6 in 10 Americans aged 18 to 29 said politicians do not represent people their age.

• False

  Psaki: Moore is “the youngest Democratic governor in the country, I think”

  Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, sworn in this year, was born in August 1979; Moore was born in October 1978.

• Mixed

  Moore: “over 5 million” Americans aged 18 to 23 are “neither employed nor in college”

  The St. Louis Fed puts the rate at 16% of 18- to 24-year-olds. That works out to about 4.8 million aged 18 to 24 and about 4.0 million aged 18 to 23. The problem is real; his number runs high.

• True

  Moore: the administration calls AI a “hoax”

  Trump has called fears of AI “taking over the World” a “HOAX” and repeated the comparison this month.

• Unproven

  Moore: “over 30 percent of his personal portfolio is AI companies”

  The figure traces to a Reddit tracker cited by the Mirror. Trump’s disclosures report holdings in value ranges, and his company says the accounts copy stock indexes.

• Misleading

  Moore: Maryland “banned the usage of AI in any forms of political campaigns”

  Maryland’s 2026 law targets deceptive deepfakes in election communications. It does not bar campaigns from using AI.

• Mostly True

  Moore: Maryland is the first state with a service year option for all high school graduates

  The “first-in-the-nation” label comes from the governor’s own office. We found no earlier statewide program for high school graduates; the caveat is that no independent body has ranked it.

• Mixed

  Implied: older lawmakers do not represent younger constituents’ interests

  Lawmakers follow voters, and voters skew old. A lawmaker’s own age shifts their agenda at the margins; in the best causal study, from Japan, younger mayors spent more on child welfare. US evidence that young legislators change outcomes is weak.

• Unproven

  Implied: older members do not care about constituents and follow their own agenda

  No study measures motive. The measurable behavior, whose preferences roll-call votes track, points to voters rather than to lawmakers’ personal agendas.

• Unproven

  Implied: Trump dismisses AI risk because of his AI investments

  He holds AI stocks and dismisses AI risk. Nothing public connects the two as cause and effect.

How old is Congress, next to its voters?

Pew Research Center put the median age of House members at 57.5 and of senators at 64.7 at the start of the current Congress in January 2025.^[5] The Congressional Research Service, using means, gives 57.9 and 63.9.^[6] For voters, we computed medians from the Census Bureau’s November 2024 voting table, which reports voting by single year of age.^[7]

Method: medians interpolated within single years of age from Census Table 1 (ages 80–84 and 85+ are grouped; we assumed 85–94 for the top group, which does not affect any median). Row totals reconcile to the table’s own totals: 260.4 million adults, 236.1 million citizens, 154.3 million voters. Voting is self-reported in this survey, which runs above official turnout.

Three things stand out.

The Senate is the outlier. Even measured against voters who meet the Constitution’s minimum age of 30, senators are about eight years older. Baby Boomers, born 1946 to 1964, hold 60 of 99 Senate seats in Pew’s count, about 61%. By our calculation from the same Census table, people of Boomer age cast about 31% of 2024 votes.^[5][7]

The House is closer than it looks. Much of the headline gap comes from comparing lawmakers with all adults, including 18-year-olds who cannot serve. Against voters aged 25 and up, the House median is 2.6 years older. Its generational mix still skews: Millennials and Gen Z hold about 15% of House seats (66 Millennials and one Gen Z member), while voters of those ages cast about 37% of 2024 votes.^[5][7]

Voters themselves skew old. People 65 and older were 23% of adults in 2024 but 28% of voters, while those under 30 were 20% of adults and 15% of voters, because turnout rises with age.^[7] The electorate Congress answers to is about four and a half years older than the adult population.

Does a lawmaker’s age change whom they represent?

This is the testable version of “do they understand what their constituents want.” Political scientists have studied it three ways.

Lawmakers follow voters

Griffin and Newman’s study in the Journal of Politics found that “voter preferences predict the aggregate roll-call behavior of Senators while nonvoter preferences do not,” and gave three reasons: voters choose like-minded representatives, voters communicate more, and only voters can re-elect.^[8] Combine that with the turnout figures above and a simple point follows. A Congress of any age has an electoral incentive to weight older Americans, because older Americans are the ones who vote. Replacing a 75-year-old senator with a 45-year-old one does not change who shows up at the polls.

A lawmaker’s own age shifts the agenda at the margins

Curry and Haydon studied bill introductions in the 109th and 110th Congresses. They found older lawmakers “are more likely to introduce legislation addressing lower salience senior issues than their younger colleagues,” while on high-profile senior issues it was the share of seniors in a district, not the member’s age, that drove attention.^[9] Age matters most where nobody is watching.

The strongest causal evidence comes from Japan. Charles McClean, a Yale political scientist, compared close elections between younger and older mayoral candidates across more than 12,000 candidates. He found that towns electing the younger candidate “increase spending on child welfare, especially through long-term investments in infrastructure,” and that younger mayors “do not cut elderly welfare spending.” He attributes the effect to “different life stages and longer time horizons.”^[10] The design compares near-identical races, so it isolates age better than any US study we found; it covers Japanese mayors, not Congress.

In the US, the evidence for young legislators is weaker

A 2024 study in State Politics & Policy Quarterly examined bill sponsorship by 3,658 state legislators in 31 states. Millennial lawmakers showed “a suggestive if not statistically significant” tendency to sponsor bills on issues Millennials rate as important, with generational patterns on student loans and climate appearing mainly among Democratic legislators.^[11] The study covers bills introduced, not bills passed, and one two-year session.

Do older members care?

No dataset measures whether a member of Congress cares about constituents, and a fact-check cannot rate motive. What can be said:

Voters think age is a problem. Pew found in 2023 that 79% of Americans favor maximum age limits for elected officials in Washington.^[12] An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll in April 2026 found about 8 in 10 favor age caps for Congress, including 78% of Democrats and 83% of Republicans, with older respondents as supportive as younger ones.^[13] In the AlphaROC survey of 18- to 29-year-olds reported by NPR, more than 6 in 10 said politicians do not represent people their age.^[13]

The behavioral evidence cuts against “their own agenda.” The Griffin and Newman finding is that senators’ votes follow voters’ preferences. That is the opposite of lawmakers ignoring constituents; the problem it describes is which constituents count. A lawmaker who ignores non-voting 25-year-olds is responding to incentives that the 25-year-olds’ own turnout creates.

Tenure is a separate problem from age. The average senator had served 11.2 years at the start of this Congress, and the average House member 8.6 years.^[6] NPR reported that five members died in office between March 2025 and May 2026, each 65 or older.^[13] Long tenure means safe seats and less electoral pressure, and that, more than age itself, is where “clinging to power” has teeth. We found no study that separates the effect of a member’s age from the effect of their seniority.

“Old men clinging to power”

Obama framed his claim globally, and the numbers bear out its factual core. Pew’s June 2026 analysis of 186 national leaders found a median age of 63; just 16 leaders were older than Trump, who turned 80 in June. Seven of the 10 oldest lead countries Freedom House rates “not free,” led by Cameroon’s Paul Biya, 93, in office for nearly 44 years.^[14] On “men,” UN Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union count 28 countries led by a woman head of state or government in 2026, about 1 in 7, and 101 countries that have never had one.^[15]

“Clinging” fits the oldest autocrats, who hold power without competitive elections. It fits democracies less well, where older leaders keep winning votes. That is why we rate the claim Mostly True rather than True. His explanation, that such leaders are “afraid of irrelevance and death,” is his interpretation of motive and is not rated.

“Youngest” and “first”

Psaki: Moore is the youngest Democratic governor (False)

Compared against: the Democratic governors serving on 22 September 2026. We checked the youngest candidates against official biographies; a single younger Democrat is enough to falsify the claim.

Moore was born on 15 October 1978.^[16] Abigail Spanberger, sworn in as Virginia’s governor in 2026, was born on 7 August 1979, according to the Biographical Directory of the US Congress, which makes her the younger of the two.^[17][18] The youngest governor of either party is Arkansas Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders, born in 1982.^[18] Psaki hedged with “I think.”

Moore: Maryland was first with a service year for high school graduates (Mostly True)

Compared against: statewide public programs offering recent high school graduates a paid year of service. The only source for the ranking is Maryland’s own government.

Maryland’s Service Year Option, created by the 2023 SERVE Act, pays recent high school graduates at least $15 an hour for a year of service. The governor’s office calls it “first-in-the-nation.”^[19] We found no earlier statewide program aimed at high school graduates, so the claim holds up as far as we could check. It stops short of True because the ranking is Maryland’s own and no independent body has confirmed it.

Moore’s other claims

“Over 5 million” young adults out of work and school (Mixed)

The St. Louis Fed measured the share of 18- to 24-year-olds “neither employed nor enrolled in school” at 16% in 2024 and found it “essentially unchanged” as of December 2025.^[20] Applied to the Census Bureau’s count of 30.0 million people aged 18 to 24, that is about 4.8 million; for ages 18 to 23, the range Moore named, it is about 4.0 million.^[7] The rate is lower for the youngest ages, so the 18-to-23 figure may be lower still: federal education data for 2022 show 10% of 18- and 19-year-olds disconnected against 14% of 20- to 24-year-olds.^[21] His prediction that the number “will continue to rise partially because of AI” is a forecast; the Fed’s data show it flat so far.

The White House calls AI a “hoax” (True), and Trump’s AI holdings (Unproven)

Trump has written that “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” and on 22 September he again compared AI warnings to a hoax.^[22][23] The “over 30 percent” figure comes from a Mirror report that cites the Reddit community Trump Trades estimating 35%.^[24] The Washington Post’s analysis of his disclosures found nearly 30,000 securities transactions since he returned to office, many in chip and data-center companies. His company told the Post the accounts are “invested through computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes” and that no family member directs them.^[25] Disclosures report value ranges, not exact holdings, so no one outside can compute the share precisely. Moore’s “simply because” asserts a motive that nothing public establishes.

Maryland “banned the usage of AI in any forms of political campaigns” (Misleading)

Moore signed a law this year protecting voters from political deepfakes, which Public Citizen counted as the 30th such state law.^[26] Laws of this kind, in Ballotpedia’s summary, regulate deepfakes in political communications, often within a window before an election and often with an exception for disclosed content.^[27] That is a ban on deceptive synthetic media, not on campaigns using AI for anything at all.

What the segment implies

Implied: older lawmakers do not represent younger constituents’ interests (Mixed)

The segment’s premise is that replacing older leaders with younger ones would get young people’s concerns addressed. Part of that holds: lawmakers’ ages shift their agendas at the margins, most clearly in McClean’s Japan study.^[9][10] Part does not: US legislators respond to voters, and the one large US study of young legislators found a generational effect that was not statistically significant overall.^[8][11] The strongest case for the segment: Congress’s agenda on fast-moving issues like AI is set by the committee chairs and leaders with the most seniority, who are among its oldest members, so the age effect could be larger on new technology than on the senior issues Curry and Haydon measured. We found no study testing that.

Implied: older members do not care and follow their own agenda (Unproven)

No measurement of motive exists. The evidence on behavior shows lawmakers following their voters’ preferences, which points to an electorate that skews old rather than to lawmakers ignoring the public.^[8]

Implied: Trump dismisses AI risk because of his investments (Unproven)

Both halves are documented; the causal link between them is not.^[22][25]

Implications

Age limits would address the Senate more than the House. The House is within a few years of the voters eligible to serve in it; the Senate’s gap and its Boomer majority are where age caps would bite. About 8 in 10 Americans support such limits in both Pew’s and Marist’s polling, though Pew notes that age limits on elected officials would likely require amending the Constitution.^[12][13][28]

Turnout is the lever the research points to. If lawmakers track voters, the fastest way for younger Americans to be represented is to become a larger share of the electorate. In 2024, voters under 30 cast 15% of ballots while making up 20% of adults.^[7] Closing that gap would change what every lawmaker, of any age, has reason to prioritise.

What would settle the open question. A US study that separates a member’s age from their seniority and party, on new issues such as AI and on the bills that pass rather than the bills introduced, would show whether age itself changes outcomes. McClean’s design, applied to close congressional primaries, is one way to do it.

The numbers support the segment’s premise that American leadership is older than the public, most of all in the Senate. They support its prescription less clearly. Younger leaders shift priorities at the margins; an older electorate shapes priorities at the core.