So far, 16 members of Congress—eight Democrats and eight Republicans—have announced they are retiring from public office before the next election. And there could be more as retirements tend to spike after the holidays.
While much of the retirement attention has been on the Democrats, who lost their only chance of holding on to a Senate seat in solidly red West Virginia, and a handful of House members who had success in swing districts, political experts say that the surge of retirements could spell bad news for Republicans.
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“In the long run, it is hard to imagine this helping the Republican Party,” political consultant Jay Townsend told Newsweek.
Townsend said that because Republicans currently hold the majority in the House, the longer that the party’s civil war and dysfunctional behavior spills into public view, the more voters will be encouraged to vote blue.
“The continued polarization and the difficulty in passing meaningful legislation are big factors in the recent wave of retirements,” Gordon said, using Representative Ken Buck as an example.
Joshua Koss, a Ph.D. student studying congressional retirements at Michigan State University, told Newsweek that leadership does not generally benefit from encouraging members to exit from Congress early because of the advantage that incumbents have.
“Congress is an odd place to work given that staff support means that members don’t really have to retire,” Ostrander, who specializes in congressional politics at Michigan State, told Newsweek.
More common then, Ostrander said, are those like Senator Joe Manchin who is likely stepping down out of fears they would lose re-election, or those like Buck who retire out of frustrations with their party.
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