Nate Silver and Dhrumil Mehta confirm that Congress is not getting younger:
We collected data from a variety of sources, including GovTrack.us, the Sunlight Foundation and The New York Times’ Congress API, on members of Congress since 1947. (We’ve posted our data compilation here.) The people who represent us are considerably older than the population as a whole. The average member of the current 113th Congress was 57.6 years old as of the start of the term on Jan. 3, 2013. This is close to the all-time high of 57.8 years, which was achieved in the 111th Congress, which came into office with Obama in 2009. By contrast, the average age was 53.0 in January 1993, when Bill Clinton took office, and 49.5 when Ronald Reagan did in 1981.
Bernstein wonders if this is “a function of perceptions (or reality) that wealth is increasingly necessary to win office”:
If being rich (and therefore unrepresentative) is linked to being older (and therefore unrepresentative), the demographics of Congress will be increasingly out of sync with the demographics of the nation.
A more benign hypothesis is that our elderly Congress is related to the growing numbers of women legislators. Women often enter Congress later in life than men (perhaps because they are less likely to want to commute between their districts and Washington, D.C. when they have young children?). That might also explain why incoming Democrats, who are far more likely to be women, are also older.
The Dish 