McConnell Isn’t An Outlier: The U.S. Senate Is The Oldest Directly Elected Upper Chamber Worldwide.
In 2024, Ro Khanna, then 48 years old, described the United States as living under a sclerotic gerontocracy. The term denotes rule by the elderly. And indeed, Americans are clearly managed by a cadre of senior politicians. The Inter-Parliamentary Union’s latest figures show the U.S. Senate holds the oldest average age among any directly elected upper legislative body in the world.
The nearly month-long hospitalization of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) underscores that observation. The 84-year-old lawmaker faced a serious health emergency and was transported by ambulance from his Washington, D.C., residence on June 14. In his absence, an already unproductive Congress becomes even less effective. Legislation proposed by the Senate’s Republican leadership has stalled as McConnell’s vote is required for its passage.
Even if the former Senate Majority Leader isn’t yet deceased, it’s worth noting that eight of the 16 members of Congress who have died in office since 2020 were over 75. The most notorious example is Sen. Diane Feinstein (D–Calif.), who endured a decline for years before dying at age 90 in 2023. Today, the average age of U.S. senators hovers around 65, and ten members are aged 79 or older.
Gerontocracy is demonstrably detrimental to economic growth. As a 2017 study in the Journal of Applied Economics noted, the aging of leaders’ own human capital can cause them to miss opportunities offered by new technologies and to fail to implement the best choices for the economy as a whole.
In a 2023 Pew Research Center poll, 79 percent of Americans favored setting maximum age limits for federal elected officials. In another Pew survey, only 3 percent of Americans supported presidents who were in their 70s or older. Yet here we are.
See my May 2025 Reason article, “Can America Get Out of the Gerontocracy Trap?” where I examined the problems and possible solutions to our sclerotic gerontocracy.
