10Apr / 2023

Congress still getting older

For FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley digs into the ongoing trend:

What’s behind these increasingly older Congresses? The country’s aging population as a whole is chiefly responsible, which is most apparent in the disproportionate influence the baby boomer generation has on Capitol Hill. Coupled with longer-running trends that have made it more likely for members of Congress to win reelection and stick around, this has all helped make Congress older than ever before. And the overrepresentation of boomers doesn’t just produce moments like those of the TikTok hearings — it also has real effects on the type of policies passed by the federal legislature.

Tags: age, Congress, FiveThirtyEight

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28Jan / 2019

See every member’s path to the House of Representatives

For The New York Times, Sahil Chinoy and Jessia Ma visualized the path to Congress for every member. See it all at once like above or search for specific members. The vertical scale represents previous categories of work and education and looks like it’s sorted by how common the categories were among Republicans and Democrats. The horizontal scale represents time, which starts at undergraduate and finishes at the House. Nice.

Tags: Congress, New York Times, Path

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14Dec / 2018

Ages in Congress, from the 1st to the 115th

As I watched Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai field questions from the House Judiciary Committee it was hard not to feel like there was a big gap in how the internet works and how members of Congress think it works. Many suggested the gap was related to age, so I couldn’t help but wonder how the age distribution has changed over the years.

You can see the median age shifting older, but I’m not totally sure what to make of it. After all, the population as a whole is getting older too. On the other hand, the internet changed a lot of things in our lives, and the hope is that those forming the policies understand the ins and outs.

Tags: age, Congress

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Tag Archives: Congress

Congress still getting older

See every member’s path to the House of Representatives

Ages in Congress, from the 1st to the 115th

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