While Democrats across the country are engaged in a debate about how old is too old, in Iowa there is a novel movement to actually have younger people run for office.

With candidates in their 30s and 40s running for governor, Senate and the House, Iowa Democrats are set to turn their red state into a laboratory for whether younger candidates can appeal to voters who have abandoned the party during the Trump era.

But Iowa’s youth movement has also exposed some of the risks when younger candidates seek big offices.

This weekend, as Zach Wahls, a 33-year-old state senator, planned to launch his Senate campaign, some Democratic operatives in Iowa circulated an old message board in which Mr. Wahls, at age 19, had opined about his pornography preferences and volunteered that his parents had given him a subscription to Playboy magazine when he was 16.

The revelations, from a 2011 appearance in an “Ask Me Anything” forum on Reddit, illustrate the potential ramifications of putting forward candidates who have grown up fully in the social-media era. Mr. Wahls is a stark example: He burst to a measure of national political fame at age 19, when he delivered a viral speech to Iowa’s State House about his experience being raised by a lesbian couple.

Other campaigns have confronted similar turbulence. Salacious online posts helped sink Mark Robinson’s race for governor last year in North Carolina, and in 2022 Blake Masters’s Senate run in Arizona was dogged by his strident chat room writings from his college days over a decade earlier.