page_title: Don Young
section_title: Elections
hierarchical_section_title: Don Young / U.S. House of Representatives / Elections
caption_attribution_description: English: Don Young ca. early 1973, around the end of his tenure in the Alaska Senate or early in his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives.
context_page_description: Donald Edwin Young is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Alaska's at-large congressional district since 1973. He is the Republican Party's longest-serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives in history, having represented Alaska for 24 terms.
  Young is the longest currently serving member of Congress, as well as the last remaining member who has been in office since the Nixon Administration; he became the 45th Dean of the House of Representatives on December 5, 2017, after the resignation of John Conyers from Michigan. He also is the oldest current member of either chamber of Congress. Prior to the special election following the death of U.S. Representative Nick Begich in a plane crash, he was Mayor of Fort Yukon from 1964 to 1967 and elected to the Alaska House of Representatives from 1967 to 1971 and Alaska Senate from 1971 until 1973.
context_section_description: Young lost his first race for Congress in November 1972 to incumbent Democrat Nick Begich, who had disappeared with Representative Hale Boggs in an Alaskan plane crash weeks before the election. Begich was declared legally dead in December 1972. Young won the resulting special election to fill the seat in March 1973. Young has been reelected 21 times, usually without significant opposition, although he faced strong challenges in the 2008 primary election and the 1974, 1990, 1992 and 2008 general elections. He won his 2016 primary with over 70% of the vote and faced Democrat Steve Lindbeck and Libertarian Jim McDermott in the general election, where he captured 50% of the vote to win his 23rd term in office,, and won again in 2018, against candidate Alyse Galvin, whose party was undeclared, with Young receiving 52.6% of the vote.
  Young is the most senior U.S. Representative and, along with Jim Sensenbrenner, one of only two members who have been in office since the 1970s. He is the second-highest ranking Republican on the Natural Resources and Transportation and Infrastructure committees. He chaired the former committee from 1995 to 2001 and the latter from 2001 to 2007. Young was the subject of an extensive FBI investigation but was eventually not charged with wrongdoing. He was subsequently the subject of a House Ethics Committee probe.
caption: Don Young at around the time he assumed his seat in the U.S. House
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