LEWISTON, Maine — In a state with the oldest median age and where aging has increasingly become a political issue, voters in Androscoggin County last week sent three men to the state Senate who are younger than 30.
At 26, Eric Brakey, an Auburn Republican and a freshman legislator, will hold the title of the Senate’s youngest lawmaker when he’s sworn in. He is joined in the Androscoggin County Senate delegation by Nathan Libby, a 29-year-old Lewiston Democrat, and incumbent state Sen. Garrett Mason, R-Lisbon Falls, who also is 29.
Libby is moving to the Senate from his seat in the House of Representatives.
Mason was 25 when he was first elected to the Senate, and Libby was 26 when he won his first House term two years ago.
Each is well below the average age of 56 for all state lawmakers in the U.S. They are among a rare group of young lawmakers who make up only 3.8 percent of the about 7,800 people elected to serve in the 50 legislatures across the country, according to data available with the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.
While Brakey is far from the youngest state lawmaker in the U.S. elected in 2014 — that title goes to Saira Blair, an 18-year-old Republican who was elected to the House of Delegates in West Virginia earlier this month — he remains one of the youngest state senators in the country.
“It’s kind of interesting, as far as young people go, it’s not like it’s just one record we are breaking here or there,” Brakey said. “It seems like we are breaking them all over the place, as far as young people coming into leadership.”
Brakey said it’s been a continuing trend for Republicans and young conservatives, not only in Maine but across the U.S., who were swept into public office in the last election cycle.
“For me and a lot of the young people I talk to who are getting involved, there’s a sense of all the debt, all the spending and all these problems that our generation is inheriting,” Brakey said. “I think that’s encouraged a lot more young people to step up to the plate and try to really take control of our future. That’s been a big motivating factor for me.”
Libby said the challenges facing young people in Maine, including finding decent work and getting an affordable education, has made them more interested in politics and more interested in electing people who can relate to their needs and concerns.
“Clearly, young people in Maine have significant challenges, and first and foremost is finding good-quality jobs when they graduate from high school or graduate from college,” Libby said.
Student debt is a key issue for his generation, according to Libby.
“It’s hampering young people’s ability to purchase new automobiles and purchase homes and a lot of young people are putting off those big investments because of the constraints of student debt,” he said.
Brakey and Libby seem to agree that countering the loss of Maine’s young people will depend on creating more and better-paying jobs. Brakey suggested one way to protect and grow industry is to lower dramatically the costs of energy in the state.
Androscoggin County, with a median age of 40.6 years, is Maine’s youngest county. The statewide median is 43.5 years, according to the most current data available from the U.S. Census.
Although Brakey, Mason and Libby will lower the average age of Maine’s Senate — it’s 61 years old — the state has a bigger problem in that migration of youth from Maine is not being made up for by new births or by the growing immigrant populations of Lewiston and Portland.
Instead, the outlook for Maine employers looking for workers and governments looking for taxpayers is approaching a critical breaking point, according to economists and others who study Maine demographics. According to some estimates, the state needs a minimum of at least 60,000 new Mainers over the next 20 years if it has any hope of maintaining its current population.
James Tierney, a former Maine legislator and attorney general who teaches law at Columbia University in New York City, has said he thinks most policymakers in Maine are simply asking the wrong questions.
Tierney said Maine’s population problem lies not only in its increasing age but more importantly in its lack of diversity and the state’s unwillingness to fully encourage more immigrants to relocate to the state.
Based on national statistics and Census Bureau data, Maine is the whitest state, with people identifying themselves as white comprising 97 percent of the population.
During a presentation at Bates College in October, Tierney said demographic data overwhelming show that Maine’s age problem is a function of too little diversity.
In email messages to the Sun Journal on Tuesday, Tierney reiterated his views.
“Maine needs more young people,” he said. “We cannot birth our way out of the problem. Even if everyone stayed in Maine — which is unrealistic — we will need to bring people into Maine, and when they come and wherever they come from, the chances that they will be white are going down. We are 96 percent white [in Maine], and the rest of the country is 64 percent white. It is just a matter of math.”
Tierney said young policymakers such as Brakey and Libby must embrace the idea that Maine needs to dramatically change its ethnic and racial makeup to thrive in the years ahead. While efforts to reduce energy costs and red tape are noble and worthwhile, he said that “it still does not reverse the decline because current jobs are already going unfilled. These steps are so small they will not — indeed, cannot — reverse the existing and dramatic demographic changes. This isn’t about politics or elections or programs. It is about numbers.”