Chuck Grassley has a 7% chance of finishing his current Senate term. Not a poll number. Not an opinion. A statistical estimate, built from the same actuarial tables the Social Security Administration uses to figure out how long Americans are expected to live. Grassley is 92. His term ends when he's 95. Run those two facts through the SSA's population data and you get 7%. That's the tool this site uses on every single member of Congress, and it's worth understanding exactly how it works before you go looking up your own senator or representative.
Seven percent. Sit with that for a second. That's not a guess about Grassley specifically. It's what happens when you take a large population of 92-year-old Americans and ask how many of them, statistically, are still around six years later. Most aren't. That's the blunt reality behind the number, and it's the same reality behind every completion score on this site.
Here's the actual mechanics behind that 7% figure. Grassley is in the Senate, which means his term is 6 years. We take his current age, 92, and ask the SSA's life tables one question: out of a large population of 92-year-olds, what percentage are statistically expected to still be alive 6 years from now, at age 95? The answer for Grassley comes out to 7%.
That's the entire method, applied consistently across every member of Congress on this site. House members get a 2-year term length in the calculation. Senators get 6 years. Younger members with decades of favorable actuarial odds ahead of them score high. Members in their 80s and 90s serving long Senate terms score much lower, sometimes drastically lower, like Grassley's 7%.
We don't adjust the number up or down based on anything else. No guessing about health, no news about hospital visits, no personal medical history. Just age, term length, and SSA population data. Two members at the same age in different chambers can end up with very different scores too, simply because a House term is a third the length of a Senate term. Age and term length together are the whole story.
This number exists to make a point that raw age alone doesn't always make clear: when you send someone to Washington for a 6-year term at age 92, you are, statistically, rolling the dice on whether they'll be there to cast votes in year six. A 7% completion probability isn't a prediction that Grassley won't finish his term. It's a statement about population-wide odds, the same kind of math insurance companies and pension funds use every day. Most 92-year-olds, according to SSA data, do not make it 6 more years. That's just what the numbers say about people at that age, in general.
Use this number the way you'd use any actuarial statistic: as a signal about scale and risk, not as a forecast about one specific person. It's a tool for understanding why the design of the institution matters. Six-year Senate terms were written into the Constitution for a country where the average lifespan looked nothing like it does now, and where nobody was running for reelection into their 90s. When you look at a member's completion probability on this site, you're seeing a snapshot of what happens when very long terms collide with very old candidates.
Think about what that means at scale, too. Every member of Congress gets this same calculation, which means you can compare completion probabilities across the entire House and Senate. That comparison is the whole point. It turns an abstract worry about an aging Congress into a concrete, sortable number you can actually hold institutions accountable with.
The formula is simple by design, because the point is transparency, not complexity. Step one: pull the member's current age. Step two: identify their chamber, which sets the term length at 2 years for the House or 6 years for the Senate. Step three: look up the SSA actuarial life table entry for that age and find the probability of surviving that many additional years. That probability becomes the member's completion score on Too Damn Old.
It's important to be clear about what this is not. It's not a medical assessment. We have no access to and make no claims about any individual member's health, diagnoses, or care. It's not a prediction, either. Some members with low completion probabilities will finish their terms easily. Some with high ones won't. What the number gives you is a population-level statistical baseline, stripped of speculation, built entirely from actuarial science that actuaries, insurers, and the federal government itself already rely on every day to price risk for millions of ordinary people. We're just pointing that same lens at Congress.
This is one piece of a bigger picture. If you want the full technical breakdown of how Too Damn Old builds every statistic on this site, including the SSA tables we pull from and how we handle edge cases, the full methodology is laid out at toodamnold.com/data. It's worth a read before you start comparing numbers across members, because understanding the math is what turns a startling statistic into a real argument.