Mashadipati: What do Democrats want? Youth

At the start of the 119th Congress, the average age of a US senator was 63.9. Bloomberg Businessweek national correspondent Joshua Green writes today about how Democratic voters are looking to lower that figure significantly when the next Senate is sworn in. Plus: Why the NBA draft is bad for business, how experts are rethinking the timing of toilet training (free link), and a new episode of Everybody’s Business. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

Thursday’s news that Maine Governor Janet Mills is bowing out of the state’s US Senate race and effectively ceding the Democratic nomination to populist oysterman Graham Platner is the latest example of a trend many of the party’s voters welcome: Democratic Senate candidates are getting younger. Finally.

Platner, 41, is almost four decades younger than Mills, 78. He’ll be challenging the 73-year-old Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in November.

He’s not the only candidate from the millennial generation. James Talarico, the Democrats’ Senate nominee in Texas, is 36. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed (41) and Mallory McMorrow (39) are running neck-and-neck in the party’s Senate primary. Iowa’s Democratic race is shaping up as a battle between Josh Turek (47) and Zach Wahls (34). And incumbents running for reelection, such as Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff (39), only add to the Democratic youth movement.

From left: State Representative James Talarico, a Democrat from Texas and US Senate candidate, speaks during a Texas primary election night event at Emo's Austin in Austin, Texas, US, on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, speaks during a re-election campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, US, on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2026. U.S. senatorial candidate from Maine Graham Platner speaks at a town hall at the Leavitt Theater on October 22, 2025 in Ogunquit, Maine. — Talarico, Ossoff and Platner.

This is a notable shift for a party whose marquee names have skewed geriatric in recent years, with diminishing returns at the ballot box. Nancy Pelosi just turned 86. Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats, is 84. Elizabeth Warren is 76. Chuck Schumer is 75. And, of course, Joe Biden, now 83, looked every bit the octogenarian as he struggled through his aborted presidential campaign in 2024.

For years, Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate leader and chief candidate recruiter, has favored older, established, politically moderate candidates, such as Mills, whom he considered safer picks with proven track records and built-in fundraising networks.

The trouble is, more and more voters don’t want them. A substantial body of polling over the past several years has shown that older candidates are out of favor. A 2023 Pew Research poll found that 79% of Americans want age limits for elected officials—including 82% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats. A spring 2026 poll from Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics that queried respondents about the ideal age for a congressional candidate found that it was just 39.

Democratic candidates in the Schumer mold haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs, though. Former Governor Roy Cooper, who turns 69 next month, handily won North Carolina’s Senate primary in March and is a narrow favorite to win in November.

And young, untested “outsiders” like Platner come with their own risks, which in his case include a history of incendiary social media posts and a tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol until he had it covered up.

The lesson from Maine seems to be that voters prefer an imperfect candidate with youth and charisma over older, entrenched incumbents. Platner’s double-digit polling lead over Mills is what ultimately persuaded the sitting governor to exit the race. Surveys also show him leading Collins in the general election race, although more narrowly.

For Democrats, an ideal outcome would be reclaiming the Senate majority in November. An even better—and hardly implausible—result would be to do so while transferring the image of being the geriatric party to the Republicans and their standard-bearer, President Donald Trump, who turns 80 next month.

In Brief

Spirit Air is laying the groundwork to shutter its operations as it runs increasingly low on cash, according to people familiar with the matter.
Iran delivered a new proposal to the US while Trump vowed to maintain a naval blockade, as the two sides pursue behind-the-scenes diplomacy to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting peace.
Trump said he was raising tariffs on cars and trucks from the European Union to 25%, claiming that the bloc had failed to fully comply with a trade agreement negotiated with the US.
Apple delivered a surprisingly strong revenue forecast for the third quarter, even as it warned that memory-chip costs will increase and that shortages of Mac computers will persist for “several months.”

On the Podcast

This week the Everybody’s Business podcast by Bloomberg Businessweek looks at two legal battles reshaping the worlds of tech and public health. First, OpenAI is in the middle of a court fight with Elon Musk over whether it betrayed its altruistic mission in pursuit of profit. The company in the meantime is pivoting into hardware. Bloomberg News editor Mark Gurman breaks down whether that’s what consumers actually want or whether that’s just a convenient distraction.

Then, the Make America Healthy Again movement went to the Supreme Court this week to fight Bayer, maker of herbicide Roundup. Businessweek columnist Deena Shanker was at the protest and joins the show to explain what the case means for the food industry and a movement at odds with the administration it helped elect.

Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

Everybody's Business

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Record Payouts

$2.68 million

That’s how much Jane Street has doled out over the past year on a per-employee basis—almost seven times as much as rival Goldman Sachs. The firm gave out $9.38 billion in compensation last year as the market maker vaulted past its biggest Wall Street competitors.

The NBA Draft Is Flawed

Illustration: Alex Gamsu Jenkins for Bloomberg Businessweek

With the NBA playoffs still in their opening round, it’s too soon to tell how the 2025-26 season will be remembered. It could be the year the New York Knicks end a 52-year championship drought, or the Oklahoma City Thunder lay claim to a dynasty, or LeBron James, at 41, makes an improbable run to another title. Whatever happens this June, the lasting story of the regular season is already clear—and it’s not a happy one for the league. This was the year of the tank: More teams than ever apparently tried to lose as many games as possible to improve their chances of securing a top pick in the draft.

The NBA has an incentive problem, writes Ira Boudway.

With tanking becoming an epidemic, see why he says it’s time to abandon the draft (and why it’s not as radical as it sounds).

Rethinking a Major Milestone

When members of the UK’s House of Lords gathered in January for their first debate of the year, an unexpected issue was high on the agenda—potty training.

The discussion came as the UK grapples with an alarming statistic: About 26% of 4-year-olds in England are not potty-trained when they start school, according to a recent survey by nonprofit Kindred Squared. Seventy years ago, by contrast, an estimated 83% of UK children were toilet-trained by 18 months, as chronicled by researchers in the book Children Under Five.

Teaching kids to use the toilet earlier could improve pediatric health, reduce waste and save money, lawmaker Alexandra Freeman told the Lords. Yet “over half of all parents are unsure of the right time to toilet-train,” she said.

In a Weekend Essay, Saabira Chaudhuri writes about how the UK is challenging the conventional wisdom about when to ditch diapers (🎁).