Pete Wilson

Barbara Boxer decided she was done. Entering her 70s, fresh off reelection to the U.S. Senate, she determined her fourth term would be her last.

“I just felt it was time,” Boxer said. “I wanted to do other things.”

Besides, she knew the Democratic bench was amply stocked with many bright prospects, including California’s then-attorney general, Kamala Harris, who succeeded Boxer in Washington en route to her selection as Joe Biden’s vice president.

When Boxer retired in 2017, after serving 24 years in the Senate, she walked away from one of the most powerful and privileged positions in American politics, a job many have clung to until their last, rattling breath.

(Boxer tried to gently nudge her fellow Democrat and former Senate colleague, Dianne Feinstein, whose mental and physical decline were widely chronicled during her final, difficult years in office. Ignoring calls to step aside, Feinstein died at age 90, hours after voting on a procedural matter on the Senate floor.)

Now an effort is underway among Democrats, from Hawaii to Massachusetts, to force other senior lawmakers to yield, as Boxer did, to a new and younger generation of leaders. The movement is driven by the usual roiling ambition, along with revulsion at Donald Trump and the existential angst that visits a political party every time it loses a dispiriting election like the one Democrats faced in 2024.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has become the highest profile target.

Last week, she drew a second significant challenger to her reelection, state Sen. Scott Wiener, who jumped into the contest alongside tech millionaire Saikat Chakrabarti, who’s been campaigning against the incumbent for the better part of a year.

Pelosi — who is 85 and hasn’t faced a serious election fight in San Francisco since Ronald Reagan was in the White House — is expected to announce sometime after California’s Nov. 4 special election whether she’ll run again in 2026.

Boxer, who turns 85 next month, offered no counsel to Pelosi, though she pushed back against the notion that age necessarily equates with infirmity, or political obsolescence. She pointed to Ted Kennedy and John McCain, two of the senators she served with, who remained vital and influential in Congress well into their 70s.

On the other hand, Boxer said, “Some people don’t deserve to be there for five minutes, let alone five years … They’re 50. Does that make it good? No. There are people who are old and out of ideas at 60.”

There is, Boxer said, “no one-size-fits-all” measure of when a lawmaker has passed his or her expiration date. Better, she suggested, for voters to look at what’s motivating someone to stay in office. Are they driven by purpose — and still capable of doing the job — “or is it a personal ego thing or psychological thing?”

“My last six years were my most prolific,” said Boxer, who opposes both term limits and a mandatory retirement age for members of Congress. “And if they’d said 65 and out, I wouldn’t have been there.”

Art Agnos didn’t choose to leave office.

He was 53 — in the blush of youth, compared to some of today’s Democratic elders — when he lost his reelection bid after a single term as San Francisco mayor.

“I was in the middle of my prime, which is why I ran for reelection,” he said. “And, frankly,” he added with a laugh, “I still feel like I’m in my prime at 87.”

A friend and longtime Pelosi ally, Agnos bristled at the ageism he sees aimed at lawmakers of a certain vintage. Why, he asked, is that acceptable in politics when it’s deplored in just about every other field of endeavor?

“What profession do we say we want bright young people who have never done this before to take over because they’re bright, young and say the right things?” Agnos asked rhetorically. “Would you go and say, ‘Let me find a brain surgeon who’s never done this before, but he’s bright and young and has great promise.’ We don’t do that. Do we?

“Give me somebody who’s got experience, “ Agnos said, “who’s been through this and knows how to handle a crisis, or a particular issue.”

Pete Wilson also left office sooner than he would have like, but that’s because term limits pushed him out after eight years as California governor. (Before that, he served eight years in the Senate and 11 as San Diego mayor.)

“I thought that I had done a good job … and a number of people said, ‘Gee, it’s a pity that you can’t run for a third term,’ ” Wilson said as he headed to New Haven, Conn., for his college reunion, Yale class of ’55. “As a matter of fact, I agreed with them.”

Still, unlike Boxer, Wilson supports term limits, as a way to infuse fresh blood into the political system and prevent too many over-the-hill incumbents from heedlessly overstaying their time in office.

Not that he’s blind to the impetus to hang on. The power. The perks. And, perhaps above all, the desire to get things done.

At age 92, Wilson maintains an active law practice in Century City and didn’t hesitate — “Yes!” he exclaimed — when asked if he considered himself capable of serving today as governor, even as he wends his way through a tenth decade on Earth.

His wife, Gayle, could be heard chuckling in the background.

“She’s laughing,” Wilson said dryly, “because she knows she’s not in any danger of my doing so.”

Decades ago, Pete Wilson did something unusual. The U.S. senator came home to run for California governor.

The path to power typically goes the opposite direction, with governors trading the statehouse for the (perceived) influence and prestige of being one of just 100 members of a club that fancies itself — not so humbly or precisely — as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Wilson bucked that sentiment.

“It is a much more difficult role,” he said of being governor, and one he came to much prefer over his position on Capitol Hill.

It turns out that Wilson, a Republican who narrowly prevailed in a fierce 1990 contest against Democrat Dianne Feinstein, was onto something.

Since, then five other lawmakers have left the Senate to become their state’s governor. Several more tried and failed.

Although it’s still more common for a governor to run for Senate than vice versa, in 2026 as many as three sitting U.S. senators may run for governor, the most in at least 90 years, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Clearly, the U.S. Senate has lost some of its luster.

There have always been those who found the place, with its pretentious airs, dilatory pacing and stultifying rules of order, a frustrating environment to work in, much less thrive.

The late Wendell Ford, who served a term as Kentucky governor before spending the next 24 years in the Senate, used to say “the unhappiest members of the Senate were the former governors,” recalled Charlie Cook, founder of the eponymous political newsletter. “They were used to getting things done.”

And that, as Cook noted, “was when the Senate did a lot more than it does now.”

What’s more, the Senate used to be a more dignified, less partisan place — especially when compared with the fractious House. An apocryphal story has George Washington breakfasting with Thomas Jefferson and referring to the Senate as a saucer intended to cool the passions of the intemperate lower chamber. (It helps to picture a teacup filled with scalding brew.)

These days, both chambers are bubbling cauldrons of animosity and partisan backbiting.

Worse, there’s not a whole lot of advising going in the Senate, which reflexively consents to pretty much whatever it is that President Trump asks of the prostrated Republican majority.

“The Senate has become an employment agency where we just have vote after vote after vote to confirm nominees that are are going to pass, generally, 53 to 47, with very rare exceptions,” said Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat who’s running to be governor of his home state.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat, is the front-runner in his bid to be the state’s next governor.

(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)

The other announced gubernatorial hopeful is Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican who’s made no secret of his distaste for Washington after a single term. Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, a fellow Republican fresh off reelection, is also expected to run for governor in her state.

Bennet arrived in the Senate 16 years ago and since then, he said, it’s been “really a one-way ratchet down.”

“You think about the fact that we’re really down to a couple [of] bills a year,” he said this week between votes on Capitol Hill. “One is a continuing resolution that isn’t even a real appropriations bill … it’s just cementing the budget decisions that were made last year, and then the defense bill.”

Despite all that, Bennet said he’s not running for governor “because I’m worn out. It’s not because I’m frustrated or bored or irritated or aggravated” with life in the Senate, “though the Senate can be a very aggravating place to work.” Rather, working beneath the golden dome in Denver would offer a better opportunity “to push back and to fight Trumpism,” he said, by offering voters a practical and affirmative Democratic alternative.

Try that as one of 47 straitjacketed senators.

When Wilson took office in January 1991, he succeeded the term-limited George Deukmejian, a fellow Republican.

He immediately faced a massive budget deficit, which he closed through a package of tax hikes and spending cuts facilitated by his negotiating partner, Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. Their agreement managed to antagonize Democrats and Republicans alike.

Wilson didn’t much care.

After serving in the Legislature, as San Diego mayor and a U.S. senator, he often said being California governor was the best job he ever had. There are legislators to wrangle, agencies to oversee, natural disasters to address, interest groups to fend off — all while trying to stay in the good graces of millions of often cranky, impatient voters.

“Not everybody enjoys it,” Wilson said when asked about the prospect of Kamala Harris serving as governor, “and not everyone is good at it.”

Harris, who served four years in the Senate before ascending to the vice presidency, has given herself the summer to decide whether to run for governor, try again for the White House or retire from politics altogether.

California’s next governor will probably have to take some “very painful steps,” Wilson said, given the dicey economic outlook and the likelihood of federal budget cuts and other hostile moves by the Trump administration. That will make a lot of people unhappy, including many of Harris’ fellow Democrats.

How would she feel about returning to Sacramento’s small stage, wrestling with intractable issues such as the budget and homelessness, and dealing with the inevitable political heat? We won’t know until and unless Harris runs.