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Yeah but you'd expect conservatives to trend older inherently as standing for vested interest and conservatism.
A brief search suggests that the average Democrat in the House is two years older than the average Republican. And the last 8 members of Congress to die in office have been Democrats.
Although it's quite possible those numbers are pretty dynamic and shift with major elections though: I couldn't trivially find a time series.
How much of that is the tendency of black seats to atrophy onto a local monarch for 50 years
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This is the kind of thing that AI should theoretically be good at, since members of congress and their dates of birth aren't too hard to find. Actual AI, however, seems to have a hard time with this. Gemini is evidently only capable of repeating what was already published as an article, so if there isn't some website that specifically says what the average was in, say, 1995, then it can't figure it out. Deepseek is slightly better in that it actually gives the answer, though it gives contradictory results within the same prompt. Based on the crappy results I did get, it seems like the Democratic average age has consistently been a couple years higher than the Republican average age for some time.
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