The House of Representatives will be younger and more diverse than ever in the next Congress, regardless of which party holds the majority.
There are 403 candidates running for the House of Representatives this cycle who are people of color, female, nonbinary, or LGBT. In the Senate, 31 candidates are women and racial or ethnic minorities. A group of 147 non-incumbent House candidates who are either on track to win safe, open seats or running in competitive districts, compiled by Axios, has an average age of 47. The average age of current House members is 58.
About 3 in 10 candidates of those 147 are nonwhite, and more than a third are women. That represents a slight increase from the 28% of female and minority members currently in the House.
The 118th Congress will get its first-ever Gen Z member when it convenes in January. Rep.-elect Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL) defeated a Republican in what was the only Democratic victory in Florida on Tuesday night. The 25-year-old is an Afro-Cuban progressive activist.
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The 2022 cycle saw the second-highest number of House lawmakers declining to run for reelection since 1996, according to OpenSecrets, leaving 46 vacancies to fill. Twenty-nine Democrats and 17 Republicans are retiring from the House this cycle. This created an opening for a new class of young and diverse candidates from both sides of the aisle and comes after the 117th Congress broke diversity records of its own.
In the current Congress, 23% of voting members are racial or ethnic minorities, according to Pew Research. Of those members, 83% are Democrats, and 17% are Republicans. House Republicans had 67 candidates of color on the ballot this cycle, giving the GOP conference a chance to break its own diversity records.
