The average age of the U.S. Congress is a hundred. No, it’s actually 59, according to Quorum, the legislative analytics startup that studied the 115th Congress, the oldest in history.

That means most of the representatives and senators there are old enough to be Rico Razo’s parents. Some are old enough to be his grandparents.

Razo was the campaign manager who led Mayor Mike Duggan’s successful reelection bid. He’s 33.

Taylor Harrell, a Detroit native who’s been interested in politics since she was a child, just ran Detroit City Council Member Mary Sheffield’s successful campaign. She’s 24. And she worries congressional representatives and party leaders old enough to be her grandparents make decisions without consulting anyone her age.

With U.S. Reps. Sander Levin and John Conyers leaving Washington, it’s past time for Michigan’s Democratic and Republican parties to not just embrace, but train future leaders, not just for 2020, but for 10 years and beyond.

But maybe they don’t have to. A cadre of Young Turks are training themselves, preparing to, in some cases, run for office – and in other cases, to rejuvenate and repair their political parties, which both have suffered major damage in recent years.

Some of that damage may have come from longtime politicians cleaving to outdated traditions based on the way things have always been done.

Today, according to Quorum, “the average American is 20 years younger than their representative in Congress. This should come as no surprise, considering that over the past 30 years the average age of a Member of Congress has increased with almost every new Congress. In 1981, the average age of a Representative was 49 and the average of a Senator was 53. Today, the average age of a Representative is 57 and the average of a Senator is 61.”

Some young southeast Michigan political operatives are seeing not just opportunities to lead, but a need to.

“I think that our party really needs to focus on messaging,” Harrell said. “I think Democrats lose because we do not know how to stay on message, and moving forward, we need to get back to the basics and focus on the nuts and bolts of how campaigns are run. We need to focus on delivering true candidates, candidates that hold true to their values, not just candidates they think will win because of name recognition. I think we fail at that…”

That, she said, included the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“I was a Bernie supporter but when the party didn’t push him forward, I definitely went with her. But that’s one thing I commend Republicans for – whether they disagree or not, whether they believe that their leader is foolish or not, they will stick together. Democrats fall apart for the public to see and they see that we’re weak and that’s how they hit us because we can’t stand together for the simplest of things. Even now, you have original Bernie supporters who are bashing the party, saying they’re leaving the party to form a third party. In the last 50 years, when have you seen a third-party candidate win at the national level?”

Young Republican Kevin Tatulyan agreed.

“Whether you’re a Republican, Democrat or you’re in business, you have to stay on message and you have to relay what you think will get you where you need to be,” he said.

To that end, the 28-year-old says he wants a new generation of Republicans to send a new message.

“As far as the Republican Party in the state of Michigan ... , what we’ve been doing is, we’ve been trying to reach out to areas where we haven’t reached out before. We’re going for minority communities. We’re going for college campuses. We’re going for Reagan Democrats. We’re going for blue-collar voters. We’re … reaching more people that we haven’t necessarily reached over the past 20 or 30 or 40 years. We’re doing that by relaying our message of what the Republican Party actually stands for, what we believe in and how we can help all those demographics achieve their American dream.”

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Tatulyan said he believes most young Republicans in Michigan are like him: They support President Trump and believe he will help the party achieve some of the campaign promises he ran on, including reforming taxes and helping with college debt. And he plans to run for office to continue that mission.

Thirty-four-year-old Moreno Taylor II says the Democrats need to pay more attention to what people see when they look at the party.

“We are one big tent, despite our infighting,” he said. “We may not be able to keep it out of the public eye as well as the GOP. But we do represent the vast majority of the American people. The way I look at it is if you’re not a corporate elitist, you’re probably going to fit under our umbrella.”

Taylor cited the party’s Project 83 (michigandems.com/project83/) effort that has sent organizers across the state “to identify what the party’s grassroots infrastructure looked like and where the party’s volunteers need to be in 2018 and what resources and training need to be provided for them.

“We’re trying to make sure they’re ready ahead of the election,” he said. “It’s probably the first time in 20 years that we’ve actually had organizers on the ground statewide in a non-statewide, non-presidential, election year. And honestly, following the election of Donald Trump, our ranks swelled quite a bit. In a lot of areas, no matter where we were, whether it was the southern border counties, the Upper Peninsula, a lot of our local Dems clubs, county clubs, we saw our numbers rise.

Unfortunately, Taylor said, the party wasn’t “able to capitalize on that right away because a lot of people were so frustrated. They wanted to do something but our infrastructure wasn’t really prepared to give them something to do. So, a lot of those numbers started to dwindle again in the three months after the election…. One of the most important things for the party is we can’t forget that we need to continue bringing people in who feel marginalized, who feel disenfranchised….”

“If people had something to believe in and they start going out locally and seeing that their vote counts, and seeing that the people who come to their doors are the ones who will be representing them at City Hall, then perhaps the voter turnout would be greater than during a gubernatorial year and presidential year.”

That turnout, particularly in Detroit, has been historically abysmal. And disaffection with politics is growing as party leaders separate themselves from their constituents, said Gabriela Santiago-Romero, a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan who's studying social work and policy. A young Democrat, she plans to run for local or state office in 2020.

"I think the party should trust young people," she said. "It should trust new Americans. It should trust women. It hasn't been doing that. The Democrats seem very elite. Just putting so much belief in the Democratic Party and being let down — it's frustrating that they haven't listened or tried to do things differently. It shouldn't be that hard to try new ideas, to be better with technology."

Santiago-Romero, who was born in Mexico and grew up in southwest Detroit, may be only 25 but she's no newcomer to politics.

She worked as an assistant to Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, was an organizer for the Hillary Clinton campaign and now serves in the cabinet of Detroit City Councilwoman Raquel Casteneda-Lopez.

She doesn't want a different political party. She wants a better Democratic Party.

"I don't want to be too cynical but (the party) still has a lot to do with greed and power, having your friends be the people that you contract or get you certain jobs. It makes it difficult to get new people into leadership positions and when they are, they might not be listened to."

She currently works with state Rep. Stephanie Chang, D-Detroit, on her Girls Making Change program, which teaches young girls how to become involved in their communities.

"We train girls to become engaged because we would like them to one day run for office," she said. "We see a total lack of women and women of color in political leadership so this is a way to feed the pipeline early on. I became for me, I became an activist early."

Both parties are vying to be the one with the largest tent to lure in a diversity of voters, which means young voters as well as those from other demographics. That may be a harder haul for the GOP than the Dems, but no small task for a Democratic Party that people feel may have its heart in the right place, but has lost touch with many of its voters.

“If the party isn’t prepared to be a home for those voters at the local level," Moreno Taylor said, “it’s easy for people to say, ‘Well, this party doesn’t speak for me and I don’t feel connected to it’ because they don’t have someone in their community that they know who’s connected to it or who’s in contact with that infrastructure.”

That disconnectedness brings us back to Rico Razo, who was born in southwest Detroit but spent his formative years in Dearborn Heights.

He said it’s time for the Democratic Party to make people believe again, if it can. And that means listening to – and embracing – younger leadership.

“People with good ideas go by the wayside because the (leaders) say, ‘We’re going to do the same thing we’ve done for 30 years,’” he said. “But the landscape is changing.”

Razo, who attended Annapolis High and Ferris State University in Big Rapids and Wayne State University, worked in the Detroit Tigers marketing department before moving to the SER Metro Detroit (Service Employment Redevelopment) program that helps residents and families facing extreme hardships. He spent five years mentoring youth and training others to do the same.

“We worked with high school students and dropouts and the unemployed, getting them back into the workforce,” he said. “I trained about 2,000 men and women over… and that was one of the greatest things I’ve ever experienced. You saw kids every single day, doing summer employment, doing resumes, doing college applications, financial aid forms. I became a father figure to a lot of young men and women …

“I’ll never forget: We did a lot of field trips, and we were at Ford Field for the NCAA tournament, and I had about 20 students with me and (one young man) walked out of the bathroom and he was excited. He said, “Mr. Razo! I put my hand under the sink, and the water just came out!’ I said we’ve got a lot of work to do. We have to expose young men and women in the city so they would know there’s more than just their neighborhood.”

Razo completed programs run by the Center for Progressive Political Leadership and the New American Leader Project and decided to run for City Council – for a minute.

“But I had a conversation with myself and said, ‘You’re going to run for office but never worked on a campaign?’"

So he attended a January 2013 community meeting with Mayor Mike Duggan who, before leaving, handed Razo his card and said he wanted him to volunteer on his reelection campaign.

“Within a week I became a neighborhood team leader in District 6,” Razo recalled. By January 2014, he was District 6 manager, a job he turned into a seven-day-a-week mission. He helped form block clubs and worked to help restore parks.

“I was up in trees with chain saws,” he said.

In December 2016, Duggan asked Razo to run his campaign, which he did by overseeing tens of thousands of phone calls and house visits.

“I think being 33 and being able to navigate every single area of this city whether in a room with the Yemeni community or Laotian community or the African-American community or pastors at fundraisers means something. The people I surround himself with, we wanted to learn a little bit about everything and I think that’s served us pretty well, being able to navigate those rooms and not be intimated by them...

. Some of the younger Democrats look at our elders, some people who bike back and forth and we’re kind of sick of the status quo and think that it’s time to change, time to work for the betterment of everybody.

“I think trust is huge,” he said. “You have to have some of these guys who had have been on the throne for a long time. Trust that these millennials who have good ideas.

"‘I still have ambitions of running for office because there are 56 million Latinos (in this country) and our political power is down in the basement. I think there’s a duty for me to represent those who aren’t at the table… We must do better. The landscape has changed and people are making decisions on behalf of residents that they don’t understand; they don’t share those experiences. Hopefully, at some point, we’ll be those decision-makers.”

Razo says he hopes Democratic leaders understand that electing Tom Perez, a first-generation Dominican immigrant, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee and U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim congressman, aren't meant to be in name only.

He recalled a visit Perez made to southwest Detroit as secretary of labor.

“He pulled up to El Nacimiento Mexican restaurant. He got out of his SUV and the first thing he did was strike up a conversation in Spanish with the owner and his son.”

That embracing of diversity and youth will be vital to the future success of either party’s future candidates. Razo is considering becoming one. He says he may run for the state Senate seat held by Coleman Young II, who is term-limited, or a House seat. He will be the first in his family to do so.

“I don’t come from a political background,” he said. “My father is a plumber, just retired from GM after 30 years, and my mother has a high school diploma and had two kids by age 19 and works for AAA in Dearborn. My parents (including a stepfather) have always been in my corner. They may not have agreed with everything I’ve done but told me to go out and be a leader.”

Young leaders like Razo, Harrell, Taylor, Tatulyan and Santiago-Romero are necessary. And the success of both parties will be determined in part by how much they recognize potential rising stars. The GOP already skews younger.

The average age of Democratic House leadership is 72, according to the Quorum study, while the average age of Republican House leadership is 48. The trend continues in House committee leadership. Republican chairpersons have an average age of 59 years old while ranking Democrats average 68.

A generation of new leadership isn’t waiting for permission to rise.

Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley. Order her book "The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery" (Wayne State University Press, 2018) from Wayne State University.