Why it's been such a slow congressional retirement season

Washington Post

2 days ago

The odd-year summer break from legislative action on Capitol Hill can be a tense waiting period to see how incumbents feel back home.
These lawmakers, particularly those who run every two years in battleground House districts, get extended time in front of their constituents to gauge how their party's agenda is faring with voters. Plus, perhaps more important, they get a long stretch of time to determine whether they want to continue the breakneck pace for the next 16 months, with the reward being another two-year term for a job that can be quite frustrating.
The question now is whether this summer and fall will play out like 2017, when a flood of Republican retirements set in motion a Democratic takeover during President Donald Trump's first midterm in 2018. Or it could play out more like 2024, when many retirees came from politically safe seats in both parties — and those so-called open seats had little impact in determining the House majority, which the Republicans maintained with the narrowest edge in almost 100 years.
One new wrinkle is all the states discussing drawing new congressional districts to give their side a better chance at the majority come November 2026. That could freeze the decision-making process for several more months. Some safe incumbents want to know whether they are getting moved into politically untenable new districts, in which case they might head for the exits rather than run hard when defeat is certain.
For now, eight Democrats and 11 Republicans are retiring from the House at the end of their terms next year, but 15 of them are actually running for higher office. Another, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D), will retire at the end of this year if she wins the New Jersey governor's race in November.
Just three of those 20 come from battleground districts: Reps. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska), Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) and John James (R-Michigan). But Craig and James are running next year for senator and governor, respectively, in their states.
So far Bacon, from a district that favored Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the last two elections, is retiring from elective politics entirely and vacating a true swing seat.
After the 2024 elections left the House in a near tie — 220 Republicans, 215 Democrats — some longtime political analysts question whether it matters if an incumbent is on the ballot at all, because the deciding voters tend to have low information about politics and, if they vote, side with the party out of power.
'This country is evenly divided, which often leads to an evenly split House. Additionally, House races have become increasingly close to being parliamentary — who the candidates are is of less importance than the party they represent,' Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, wrote in late July. 'Among the tiny slice of voters in the middle, when they do vote, they are far more likely to vote against a candidate than for someone.'
Regardless of such assessments, the operatives inside the two caucus's political arms — Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its counterpart, National Republican Congressional Committee — always believe it's best to have their battle-tested incumbents running for reelection, as they are familiar to voters and comfortable raising the extreme amounts of money needed in today's politics.
And there also tend to be domino effects among lawmakers who see longtime friends deciding to leave, prompting them to consider retiring rather than running for another term.
Trump's first midterm election cycle provided a great example of this, as the return from August recess started with a retirement bang.
Within five days in early September 2017, Reps. Dave Reichert (R-Washington), Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania) and Dave Trott (R-Michigan) announced they would vacate their suburban swing districts.
Reichert and Dent had won seven terms, and Trott two. All three won in 2016 by wide double-digit margins. In his announcement, Dent cited a political climate dominated by 'disruptive outside influences that profit from increased polarization and ideological rigidity that leads to dysfunction.'
Democrats won all three of those seats the following year.
That set the tone for the remainder of the midterm elections, as seasoned GOP members bowed out, including two veteran California Republicans, Reps. Darrell Issa and Edward R. Royce, who announced two days apart in early January 2018 that they would not run for reelection.
Democrats won both of those seats also, en route to an election in which they won 13 seats previously held by Republicans that had been left open by retirements, and one where the GOP incumbent lost his primary. Democrats won a net gain of more than 40 seats in 2018 and held the majority for four years.
All told, 52 House members retired that election season, including the speaker, Paul D. Ryan (R-Wisconsin), the largest number in the past 30 years, according to the Brookings Institution. Almost three dozen more lost either in their primary or general elections, a massive turnover of more than 20 percent of the 435-member House.
Sometimes the retirement wave does not start after the August recess and instead comes later in the odd year, around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season. That's also the point at which veteran incumbents and their campaign operatives have a bit more political data about where the district stands, how it approves or disapproves of the president, and whether the lawmaker can win in the upcoming midterm.
In mid-December 2009, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tennessee), a 13-term veteran, joined a growing number of Democrats who saw a brutal 2010 taking shape and decided to depart. In Gordon's case, he had coasted to reelection every two years, not even facing a Republican opponent in 2008, but that year his voters had given John McCain a more than 20-point margin in the district over Barack Obama.
He hit a reflective point in life and decided it was time to bolt.
'Turning 60 has led me to do some thinking about what's next,' Gordon said in a statement at the time. 'I have an 8-year-old daughter and a wonderful wife who has a very demanding job.'
Gordon was one of four Democrats, with more than 60 years of combined experience, to announce retirement plans in the week of Thanksgiving or the two weeks following it.
Obama had become deeply unpopular in the South. In spring 2010, just 42 percent of Tennesseans approved of his job performance. As a result, Republicans won Gordon's seat with 67 percent of the vote, and they have held it since without too much effort.
Republicans won the three other seats as well, part of a 63-seat wave in terms of House seats gained.
Today's swing-seat incumbents are dominated by a large number of relative newcomers, the type of people who are in quite different political circumstances than Gordon in 2010 or Reichert in 2018.
Of the 18 House races that the Cook report rates as pure toss-ups, just three incumbents started serving before Trump ran for president in 2016: Reps. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) and David Schweikert (R-Arizona).
Expanding out to include the next 22 most competitive races, only three incumbents began their House service before Trump entered politics.
By and large, these incumbents have generational profiles like Reps. Michael Lawler (R-New York) and Emilia Strong Sykes (D-Ohio). Lawler, 38, defeated a Democratic incumbent in 2022, helping Republicans reclaim the House majority, and won again in 2024 even as Harris won his district over Trump.
Sykes, 39, won a close race in 2022 and, in a presidential year in which Harris and Trump effectively tied in her district, she won by more than 2 percentage points.
At this point, especially after Lawler decided against a bid for governor, both are running hard for reelection with no intent to retire.
Yet each of their states gets mentioned when it comes to redistricting, with Republicans having full control of the Ohio state legislature and Democrats in charge of the New York legislature.
If those states start redrawing the House districts, their seats would be prime targets for partisans to move the lines around to make easy pickups for the other party.
Any massive revamping of these districts could prompt a flurry of new retirement announcements.