Politicos of the future

There’s still a long way to go until the 2018 midterm elections, but an unusually high number of people thinking about running for office. There’s good reason. It’s the modern equivalent of starting atech company in the late 2000s — a play for power, where the odds are most favorable.

The tech startup boom that began in the late 2000s and has tapered off over the past few years occurred because of a combination of technological, economic and demographic forces. The simultaneous explosive growth in social media and smartphones led to the rise of Facebook, Google, Apple, gaming companies like Zynga and King Digital, ridesharing companies Uber and Lyft, social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, and many other startups.

Today the environment has changed. Rather than creating new platforms like Facebook did, upstarts now find themselves competing with the likes of Facebook, a daunting task. In 2008 a young person could envision striking gold with a tech startup. Nowthat seems implausible, but rising through the political hierarchy seems imaginable. In 2017, conditions are in place for an unprecedented surge in the number of people looking to run for office.

Part of the attraction of running for office in 2018, at least on the Democratic side, is the high level of attention and financial engagement the party’s base is

showing already in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election. Jon Ossoff, the first-time Democratic candidate in Georgia’s 6th congressional district special election, raised over $8 million for the race’s recently completed “jungle primary.” The vast majority of his moneycamefromout of state, much of it raised via viral social media campaigns. Whereas in the past a candidate may have needed a slew of local media and elected officials’ endorsements, plus the financial backing of wealthy and powerful people in the community, today seemingly any candidate and campaign has the potential to catch fire and go viral nationally.

There’s a demographic component here as well. The same crop of people who were in their late teens and early 20s in the aftermath of the great reces- sion are growing up, and are now old enough to run for office, like Ossoff, age 30 — and their cohort could vote for them in the same way young people consumed the products of Zynga and Snapchat. At the same time, most of the elected officials and leaders of the Democratic Party are nearing retirement. Nancy Pelosi is 77. Bernie Sanders is 75. Elizabeth Warren is 67.

If you’re an ambitious person in your late 20s, what’s more likely — that you disrupt the businesses of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, or that you ascend through the ranks of the Democratic Party over the course of a few election cycles as the party’s leadership retires and baby boomers shrink as a share of the electorate? Conor Sen, Bloomberg View