Kamala Harris has declared that this election is about passing the torch to a “new generation of leadership.”

Ironically, it is Donald Trump, not Harris, meeting this challenge.  By choosing J.D. Vance as his running mate, Trump is implementing the long overdue process of bringing a new, younger generation into key national governing positions.

A Donald Trump victory this November will for the first time ever put someone younger than a Baby-Boomer, the Millennial Vance, a heartbeat away from the presidency and in position to become the first Millennial president in 2029.

On the other hand, a victory by sixty-year-old Baby-Boomers Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on November 5 could keep Millennials, Gen Xers and Gen Zers out of the White House at least until 2033.  If her V.P. were to successfully run for president, Boomers could continue to dominate national politics until 2041.

As a member of the Millennial cohort, born between 1983 and 1996, J.D. Vance, just 39 years old when Trump selected him as his running mate in June of this year, is two generations removed from the Boomer cohort.

The Baby Boom generation, born between the years 1946 and 1964, added seventy-six million people to the U.S. population, which stood at around one hundred and forty million in 1945.  By the time this birth boom ended in 1965, Baby-Boomers made up almost forty percent of the U.S. population.

Because of their oversized representation in the U.S. population, Boomers have made their presence felt in every corner of society over the decades.  The U.S. built elementary schools, high schools and college dorms to accommodate the Boomers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and then constructed massive numbers of townhouses and single-family residences to house them and their children.  Now society is investing in massive medical facilities and health care systems to help Boomers live productive post-retirement lives.

Over the decades, this cohort dominated academia, the arts and culture, and the nascent computer tech industry.  Boomers Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Jobs created the world of personal computers and smartphones.

But this demographic group has had arguably its greatest impact in the political sphere.

Boomers have owned the presidency since the 1993–2001 reign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.  Boomer George W. Bush bested Gore in the 2000 presidential race and then beat fellow boomer and Yale frat brother John Kerry in 2004.  Boomer Barack Obama occupied the White House from 2009–2017, and Donald J. Trump won in 2016 over fellow Boomer Hillary Clinton.  Only “silent generation” member Joe Biden interrupted the Boomer reign, and Biden has already been replaced by a Boomer, Kamala Harris, as the 2024 Democrat party standard-bearer.

Although Boomers now represent only twenty percent of the population, they continue to dominate the other branches of the federal government.  As of 2023, they made up sixty-five percent of the United States Senate and forty-five percent of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Five of the nine Supreme Court justices are Baby-Boomers, and a sixth, Brett Kavanaugh, misses Boomer status by a mere forty-three days.  Twenty-eight of the fifty state governors are Boomers.

A Trump-Vance victory puts in motion a historic shift of power from the Boomers to Vance’s fellow millennials, Gen-Xers, and Gen-Zers.

It is about time their voices are heard and their interests served.  Vance’s generation and those after his will shoulder the burden of paying for all the excessive government spending and the resulting national debt and price inflation.  They are the citizens struggling to afford  a home or car and find good full-time career positions.

Vance will offer the younger generations conservative strategies such as tax cuts and massive deregulation to bring them out of this economic malaise.

A Trump administration followed by a Vance presidency would mean twelve consecutive years of populist leaders implementing center-right policies focused on achieving prosperity at home and peace abroad.

Over the last several months, on political talk shows and in his October 1 CBS V.P. debate with Tim Walz, Vance has emerged as a rising political star, a young, personable MAGA candidate able to clearly articulate his populist principles forcefully yet diplomatically.  Pundits on the left and right are realizing that as Trump’s V.P. and then as president, Vance will be more than capable of achieving populist economic and foreign policy goals.

“In choosing an ideological admirer as his veep,” writes Scott McConnell in Chronicles Magazine, “Trump has ensured that some variant of Trumpism would survive after his second term” and “secure a prominent place for it in the Republican Party during the generation to come.”

Tom Piatak writes in the same issue of Chronicles that  “should Trump succeed in handing the White House and his followers over to Vance, the wretched group running America these many decades may at last be supplanted by a new elite committed to putting America and Americans first.”

Trump has been quickly expanding the GOP voting bloc to now include sizeable portions of traditional Democrat groups such as black Americans and Hispanics.  By picking Vance as a running mate, and additionally having younger surrogates such as Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tucker Carlson represent him on the stump, Trump is attracting Millennials, Gen-Zers, and Gen-Xers to the GOP.

From now to Election Day and beyond, Trump would be wise to market J.D. Vance as “the voice of the new generation,” younger Americans’ “seat at the table,” the man championing their interests and safeguarding their future.

As the Democrats have said, it is time to pass the torch to the next generation.  Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are about to grant them their wish.

Sociologist Michael G. Zey, Ph.D., is the author of Ageless Nation, Seizing the Future, and The Future Factor, Professor, Montclair State University (retired).  www.zey.com.  twitter.com/futurist3000.  Facebook.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.