A Young Pennsylvanian Shows Up and Wins
This year, Zohran Mamdani made history as the youngest mayor elected in over a century to lead New York City, with more than 50 percent of the vote in the three-way race. Much of Mamdani’s success can be attributed to the young people who canvassed in all five boroughs of the city to help him pull off an astonishing victory.
But young New Yorkers aren’t the only ones speaking out or lining up behind younger candidates. In western Pennsylvania, that surge led to Sam Bigham, 23, becoming the youngest mayor ever of Carnegie, a Pittsburgh suburb southwest of the city. After graduating from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history, Bigham decided to run for mayor because he felt the Carnegie Town Council needed more younger residents to invigorate town government.
“It’s important to have someone with more energy, ’cause I think another thing that happens when you’re in a position for so long is you kind of get stuck in your ways,” Bigham told the Prospect.
It’s a surge that shows that Generation Z, the country’s youngest cohort of voters, is fed up with a traditional politics-as-usual that steers longtime incumbents back into office and holds off fresh faces and ideas. Run for Something (RFS), a national organization that works to recruit the next generation of progressive leaders and help run their campaigns, saw intense interest from young people in running for office in 2025: Before President Trump completed his first year in office, more than 75,000 people had reached out to RFS to express interest in getting into politics.
The Keystone State town was named after steel baron Andrew Carnegie in return for him gifting Carnegie a high school and a library. Carnegie was a destination for steelworkers and their families for more than a century before the industry began to collapse in the late 1970s.
Carnegie has struggled for decades to rebound. The town attempted to attract visitors from the surrounding area before Hurricane Ivan in 2004 undid much of that progress: Chartiers Creek, which runs through the town, flooded, damaging Main Street and other neighborhoods. A recent fire, in 2024, that shuttered popular restaurants on Main Street has also impacted the town’s comeback. Today, Carnegie is home to nearly 8,000 residents.
For the past 20 years, the town’s residents have worked to rebuild the damaged storefronts and attract new businesses to Main Street. Bigham says that Carnegie’s revitalization project has been exceptionally successful. “You wouldn’t really be able to tell there was a flood in this town,” he says. As he looks forward to his first year in office, Bigham intends to build on that momentum and continue working on Carnegie’s comeback.
He plans to encourage more community events and support existing ones in the hope that Carnegie will become a destination spot for Pennsylvanians. “I want to do more to promote and market the town to people to come and visit and check out, and maybe even move to,” Bigham says. These events would include bringing more vendor markets to the town and expanding the farmers and holiday markets that are already popular with residents.
Bigham is uniquely situated to help further Carnegie’s comeback as he’s also the director of the Carnegie Community Development Corporation (CCDC) in addition to being mayor. The CCDC is the main organization in charge of revitalizing Carnegie, promoting the town, and attracting new businesses and residents. He’s also studying for a master’s degree in public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University.
He’s very aware that his age poses certain pressures. On the campaign trail, Bigham worked hard to make sure voters in Carnegie knew he was a serious candidate. Bigham wasn’t someone who thought it might be fun to run for mayor: Not only was he a Carnegie native and recent graduate, he worked as a junior town council member and interned with Pennsylvania state Rep. Anita Kulik (D-Allegheny County). She endorsed Bigham.
Bigham’s opponent, David Klug, 59, a local cartoonist whose work adorns the walls of Primanti Bros. sandwich shops, a beloved Pittsburgh-area chain of stores, harped on his opponent’s age during the campaign—but that strategy ultimately backfired. “When I was actually door-knocking and having conversations with people, the age thing actually kind of seemed to be a positive for most people,” Bigham says.
He beat Klug with 75 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary and ran unopposed in November, garnering the most votes in Carnegie history.
Running for office fresh out of college in your hometown may seem unusual, but RFS data shows that Bigham is not an outlier. Young candidates aren’t just running, they’re winning. Other Gen Z candidates achieved historic wins last November, including 22-year-old Jayden Williams becoming mayor of Stockbridge, Georgia, in metro Atlanta, and Eva Fipps, a 20-year-old college student stepping into the mayor’s office in Henderson, Iowa, a small town west of Des Moines near the Nebraska border.
These new officeholders have the potential to revitalize local governments in small towns across the country with their ideas and energy. They can also help prepare other young politicians to hold higher office in the future. Bigham said he hopes young people looking into politics begin to understand that getting their foot in the door is easier than they think.
“Running for office is just people skills: talking to residents, talking to other elected officials, just talking about yourself and why you’d make a good candidate and what you want to do and why you think you’ll be able to accomplish it,” Bigham says. “So, I encourage people to at least look into it.”
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