Amanda Litman spent the past decade building a way for more younger people to run for office.
Now, as the Democratic party debates its ageing leaders after the former president’s decline led to a bruising loss in 2024, a groundswell of younger Democrats are working to remake the party by challenging incumbents and calling out leaders who fail to push back against Trump.
It’s a moment Litman has been waiting for.
Litman co-founded Run for Something, an organization that recruits and trains progressives age 40 and younger to seek elected office, the day Trump was inaugurated in 2017. Since then, the group has sought to dismantle the gerontocracy, helping to elect more than 1,500 people across 49 states. More than 200,000 people have signed up to explore a run for office, more than 40,000 of whom signing up since Trump won last November.
“The Democratic party’s reliance on seniority is really our downfall,” she told the Guardian. “Imagine how hard it is to tell your grandparents that it’s time for them to stop driving. This is the same: how do you tell someone they’re no longer fit to do the thing that they’ve been doing for decades, but maybe feel called to and derive all their self-esteem and their sense of identity from?”
These conversations are “really hard”, but it’s vital to have them now, and in the open, because Democrats are seeing the consequences of avoiding the issue for too long, she said.
Those younger leaders also have a distaste for institutions and are more eager to tear them down or propose alternative ways to rebuild the government. Younger leaders are “very open about what change could look like, and that can be really scary to the people who’ve been building these institutions for the last 10, 20, 30 years,” Litman said.
Three older Democrats have died in office just this year. After the most recent death, of Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly, Litman wrote on social media that “older Democrats need to retire now and go out on their own terms. Let us celebrate your legacy! Don’t let your leadership end in a primary loss or worse, real grief.”
Her new book, When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership, details how millennials and gen Z leaders can remake their workplaces and become the kinds of leaders they’ve always wanted. It’s not explicitly about politics, though some people in elected office or other political work are interviewed.
“When we make workplaces better, we give people back their time to do more politics outside of it, like being a better citizen,” she said. “It’s really hard to imagine going to a protest or volunteering for a candidate if you are working around the clock, and you get home from your nine-to-five and you’re just drained. Part of the reason why I want to push this conversation outside of politics is because I think the more we can make work not suck, the better everything else cannot suck too.”
She advocates for separating your work from your personhood and bringing your authentic self to work, albeit a modified version she calls “responsible authenticity”. The same lessons she found across workplaces apply to politicians, she writes, and points to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, as someone who strikes the right balance of showing her humanity but maintaining boundaries.
“The members of Congress I spoke to brought up the same kinds of challenges as the lawyers, as the faith leaders, as the business executives and media folks,” she said. “They all talked about loneliness. They all talked about vulnerability. They talked about the challenges of wanting to be authentic but not wanting to let everyone into all your shit.”
As Democrats debate how to rebuild their side of the aisle, Litman expects to see more primaries, something the party has often sought to avoid at the national level, often believing they’re a waste of resources. Primaries are more common in the state and local races that Run for Something works on, and the group has at times endorsed more than one person in a primary.
Primaries are “clarifying”, Litman said. “Politics, like everything else, is something you get better at with practice. Primaries are how you get better.”
Those primaries aren’t simply progressive-versus-centrist showdowns right now, she said. They’re more about who is showing they have the fight in them to stand up to the Trump administration, more about who has “the skills and the stomach”.
Beyond primaries, the left should be having open conversations about who needs to retire. Litman said a retirement, with an open race, is much more preferable than unseating an incumbent, which can get messy.
“If we really think that this is a crisis, we need leaders who are going to act like it and be able to communicate that,” she said. “I’m not sure that Senator [Chuck] Schumer and other older members of Congress are most well suited to do that. That’s not a personal failing. It’s just we got to send our best.”
