Yes, Democrats have an age problem. But it’s not Biden.

Say what you will about the professional pundit class, they’re right about one thing: Democrats have an age problem.

Where they’re wrong is their ageist clucking about President Joe Biden. (A whole four years older than his fascist predecessor and soon-to-be official electoral opponent? Quelle horreur.) The problem is, in fact, much bigger: the party’s manifest contempt for younger voters and the issues that matter to us.

At 38, I’m a millennial just aging out of the “young voter” demographic. I’m also old enough to remember how, over the past two decades, party leaders have all too often paid lip service to younger voters while wholly discounting the issues that matter most to us. These are many of the same issues championed by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — issues like student debt, climate change, and mass incarceration. As a longtime organizer and activist, I’ve spent a long time working to earn a place for our priorities within the party — knocking on doors, passing around nominating petitions, and serving on ward committees getting out the vote for Democratic slates.

I wasn’t always so electorally engaged. Most progressive organizers (myself included) got our start in the street, not the polling place. We’re veterans of exciting moments of mass protest like the post-9/11 antiwar movement, 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Matter marches of 2014. We got arrested at Abolish ICE protests in 2018 and tear-gassed during the George Floyd uprisings of 2020. As the buzz faded from the headlines, though, we always seemed to find ourselves bumping up against the existing power structure, begging for lasting change.

Gradually, many of us came to realize that if we wanted to make permanent headway, it wasn’t enough to make headlines. We needed to have a presence in the halls of power. If we wanted the establishment to care about our issues, we needed to become an electoral force within the party.

But time and time again, we have been blocked from doing so — most recently, when 20 Philadelphia committeepeople were ousted from the Democratic Party structure for backing members of the progressive Working Families Party in the last election.

Never mind that many young activists, including me, had entered party politics at the invitation of its establishment. The city’s most powerful party needed engaged and passionate young voter activists, they said. They didn’t want us just camped outside City Hall in tents; they wanted us in their tent. That was the song the Dems sang to us on repeat in the 2010s. We were good at getting our friends out into the street; now we needed to get them out to the polls.

That’s exactly what many of us millennials within progressive and other movements did. We showed up. We accepted the invitations to run for spots on our ward committees, which represent the party at the neighborhood level. While our friends were out doing bar crawls, we spent spring nights sipping beer to stump speeches and dutifully circulating candidate petitions. We knocked on doors and sat on polling place doorsteps handing out literature every May and November.

In other words: We put in our time. Time, we were told, that would earn us a seat at the table.

We put in our time.

That’s the problem with promising people power in exchange for labor and patience: eventually, the time comes to pay up. But rather than honor that debt, the Philadelphia Democratic Party establishment has chosen to try and throw us out of the building, simply because we had the temerity to demand that we now be heard, after all our hard work.

It’s hard work that paid off. In November, thanks largely to young voter mobilization efforts, Working Families candidates took both of the City Council seats reserved for non-Democrats — seats that Republicans had held for more than 70 years.

And yet, rather than celebrate this ascendent, engaged class of young electoral leaders, our local Democratic establishment has declared war, purging from office many of the committeepeople who signaled support for these Working Families candidates.

Party bureaucrats warned us that we would be expelled if we joined the effort to protect those two Council seats from Republicans, as to do so would violate an archaic party bylaw. (In response, I resigned from the committeeperson position I’d held for a decade, bitterly disappointed to see the party effectively supporting Republicans’ candidacy in the era of MAGA.) They forced us to choose between combatting an increasingly extremist GOP and risking our positions within party leadership — positions our neighbors had elected us to hold.

For the whole of my adulthood, Democrats have struggled desperately with young voter turnout. Now, at least in Philadelphia, there is a progressive infrastructure in place that not only speaks to but reliably delivers young votes. And the Democratic establishment is trying to dismantle it.

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What’s especially galling — and dangerous — is the timing.

Philadelphia is the brightest blue dot in a crucial swing state. Biden is set to face off against an aspiring fascist dictator in the race for the presidency, and millennial and Gen Z turnout could make or break his chances at reelection. Yet, Democratic leaders here are spending these last critical months purging the party of the very people most likely to convince under-40s that getting to the polls could make a difference.

So, yes, it’s true: Democrats have an age problem.

But the problem has nothing to do with the biology of Biden’s brain and everything to do with our party establishment’s resistance to progressive change.

Gwen Snyder is a writer, researcher, and longtime Philadelphia organizer.