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Younger Democrats are announcing runs for office — sometimes against incumbents — in an expression of frustration with the establishment.
April 10, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
George Hornedo, a liberal activist and Democratic Party strategist in Indianapolis, had already been weighing a primary challenge to the local congressman when he was confronted last month by a senior Indiana Democrat.
Asked whether he was planning a run, Mr. Hornedo, 34, acknowledged he was considering it. The woman, he recalled, told him he was “going to get hurt.” He posted his recounting of the interaction on TikTok, where it quickly went viral. “Don’t let them scare you off,” one commenter wrote.
On Wednesday, Mr. Hornedo announced his campaign against the nine-term incumbent, Representative André Carson, while deriding him and those like him as “do-nothing Democrats” and promising a new generation of leadership for Washington. “The Democratic Party cannot win the future with a leadership structure that is built for the past,” he said in an interview.
A small but growing group of young Democrats are being propelled to act by outrage among rank-and-file voters, and especially among young people. Infuriated by the early months of President Trump’s second term, impatient with the status quo and frustrated with party leadership, they are mounting bids for office.
In California, Jake Rakov, 37, a onetime Capitol Hill aide to Representative Brad Sherman, 70, is challenging his former boss. And even Representative Nancy Pelosi, 85, the California Democrat who stepped down from her two-decade leadership role in 2023, faces a primary challenge, from Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, the former campaign manager for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who ran a similar playbook in her first race for Congress.
Some of these efforts look like long shots against well-funded and better-known incumbents. But they amount to a manifestation of the anger felt by voters toward the Democratic Party — after President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ignoring their concerns, waited until late in the game to abandon his attempt at re-election — and the sentiment that a younger generation might be better equipped to oppose Mr. Trump.
