Gen Z Candidates Are on the Ballot in the November Midterms

The youngest names on your November ballot might not be old enough to rent a car. Gen Z Candidates Are on the Ballot in the November midterms in races stretching from California school boards to an Iowa statehouse seat — and while most of them will lose, the ones who break through keep proving that running young is a strategy, not a stunt.

Start south of Los Angeles, where four Gen Z hopefuls are contesting local offices. The youngest is Rylee Joseph Peak, eighteen and running for mayor of Moreno Valley. Sophia Castillo, nineteen, wants a seat on the Colton school board. And two twenty-year-olds — Brandon Macias and Jose Osuna-Tisnado — are running for the Rowland Unified school board and the Perris City Council respectively. When the Southern California News Group interviewed the four, it found a mix of youthful idealism and concrete local concerns: the cost of living, climate change, and the warehouses, data centers and artificial intelligence reshaping their communities, according to California City News. Gen Z Candidates Are on the Ballot in force at the local level, where the filing fees are low and the doors are close together.

They are part of a much bigger surge. More than a hundred Gen Z candidates launched bids for Congress this cycle, The Hill reported this month, citing data from the youth-candidate group Future Caucus. Few have broken through. Layla Zaidane, the group's president and chief executive, told the outlet that younger candidates tend to run outside the two major parties, which makes winning statistically harder — and that they start with far less money than established opponents. "A lot of Gen Zers are running based on enthusiasm or some grassroots energy, but they aren't as well-funded as their opponents," she said.

The exception that proves the rule

There has been one spectacular exception. Melat Kiros, a twenty-nine-year-old democratic socialist, ousted longtime Representative Diana DeGette in a Colorado primary earlier this year and is heavily favored to win the safely Democratic seat in November. Unlike most of her generational peers, Kiros paired grassroots energy with serious money: she raised more than a million dollars, per that report. Her win suggests the barrier is not age itself but the resources that usually come with it.

In Iowa, twenty-two-year-old Dillon Fillion is testing whether a different formula can work at the state level. A Domino's delivery driver taking a gap year from Scott Community College, where he studies criminal justice, Fillion is believed to be the youngest person ever to seek office in Scott County. He told Fox News Digital he wants to cut property taxes, increase police funding and give parents more say in education — and that voters are hungry for fresh faces: "I think it's time for my generation to step up," he said. The youth wave, in other words, is not ideologically uniform: it spans democratic socialists in Colorado, pizza-delivery conservatives in Iowa and pragmatists worried about warehouses in California.

Why local races are the real opening

History suggests the smart money is on the school boards and city councils, not Congress. California has seen this movie before: Rafael Ramirez won a school board seat at eighteen in 2003, and Jeremy Yamaguchi joined the Placentia City Council at nineteen five years later. In 2024, Kaylee May Law won a Walnut City Council seat. And the long game can pay off — Michael Tubbs joined the Stockton City Council at twenty-two in 2012 and went on to become the city's mayor, while Hipolito Cerros won his council seat as a college student in 2020 and became mayor at twenty-five.

That pattern is exactly what makes this year's crop worth watching. Congressional bids generate headlines, but the unglamorous local offices are where young candidates actually win — and where decisions about housing, schools and policing get made. With the midterms less than two weeks out, the down-ballot races may end up being the most consequential part of Gen Z's political coming-of-age.

What to watch on Election Day

The structural odds are still brutal. Money, party machinery and name recognition all favor incumbents, which is why more than a hundred congressional bids produced so few breakthroughs. But the pipeline is widening: every cycle puts more young names in front of voters, and every local win builds a bench for the next decade.

For voters, the takeaway is simple — Gen Z Candidates Are on the Ballot, but you have to look past the top of the ticket to find them. Polls suggest young voters will turn out in force this November; the question is whether they will also vote for candidates their own age. Down-ballot races are often decided by hundreds of votes, which means a generation that shows up can hire its own representatives — literally.

And the trend is not slowing. With candidates as young as eighteen contesting mayoralties and a twenty-nine-year-old poised to enter Congress, the idea that politics is a waiting game looks increasingly dated. The midterms are shaping up to be unusually volatile — and the youngest people on the ballot intend to be part of the reason why.