Donald Edwin Young is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Alaska’s at-large congressional district since 1973. 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. Young has been reelected 21 times, usually without significant opposition, although he faced strong challenges in the 2008 primary election and 1974, 1990, 1992, and 2008 general elections.
About Don Young in brief
Donald Edwin Young is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Alaska’s at-large congressional district since 1973. 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 is also the oldest current member of either chamber of Congress. Before the special election following U. S. Representative Nick Begich’s death in a plane crash, he was mayor of Fort Yukon from 1964 to 1967 and a member of the Alaska House of Representatives from 1967 to 1971 and the Alaska Senate from 1971 to 1973. He was elected to the State House in 1966 and re-elected in 1968. Young has been reelected 21 times, usually without significant opposition, although he faced strong challenges in the 2008 primary election and 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 to win his 23rd term in office, and won again in 2018, against candidate Alyse Galvin, whose party was undeclared. Young was born in Meridian, Sutter County, California. He earned an associate’s degree in education from Yuba College in 1952 and a bachelor’s degree from Chico State College in 1958. He served in the Army from 1955 to 1957. Young moved to Alaska in 1959, not long after it became a state. He eventually settled in Fort YukON, then a 700-person city on the Yukon River, seven miles above the Arctic Circle in Alaska’s central interior region.
He made a living in construction, fishing, trapping and gold mining. He captained a tugboat and ran a barge operation to deliver products and supplies to villages along the Yuk on River. He still holds his mariner’s license. Young said he \”loved\” the job before he \”got ambitious\” and ran for the Alaska State Senate in 1970. Young lost his first race for Congress in November 1972 to incumbent Democrat NickBegich, who had disappeared with Representative Hale Boggs in an Alaskan plane crash weeks before the election. Young won the resulting special election to fill the seat in March 1973 and was declared legally dead in December 1972. He credits his victory to his leadership of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System for the least at least 55,280. He won a full term in 1974 with 51,641 votes to Democratic State Senator Willie Hensley’s 44,280. He chaired the Natural Resources and Transportation and Infrastructure committees from 1995 to 2001 and the latter from 2001 to 2007. He said he said he “hated” the State Senate and, after encouragement from his first wife, ran for Congress. He has been the subject of an extensive FBI investigation but was eventually not charged with wrongdoing. He is the second-highest-ranking Republican on the natural resources and transportation and infrastructure committees and chaired the former committee from 1995-2001.
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