House Republicans have limited most of their retirements to conservatives in solidly red districts and a handful of statewide-office seekers, but political analysts say 10 to 15 more Republicans could announce in the coming months that they are stepping down.<\/p>\n
With the president’s approval ratings between 35 and 40 percent, the unrest in Iraq and GOP scandals still problems for Republicans in polls, the number of possible Democratic pickups looks to be growing.<\/p>\n
“If you look at past experience, it would suggest that you tend not to get a last-minute rush” of retirements, said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But I don’t know if that’s going to be the case this time. I think that actually the scandals, the problems, the headaches may cause a number of people two or three months from now to decide that maybe it’s time for a change, maybe they need to spend more time with their families…. I think we could see up to 40.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There are now 25 open seats, 16 are held currently by Republicans, but the number keeps going up. It’s reminiscent of another campaign cycle…<\/p>\n
Amy Walter, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report, observed that in August 1993 there were three Democratic open seats. By March that had jumped to 22 and by July to 30.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s a trend worth keeping an eye on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It often gets overlooked, but one of the factors that helped the GOP take control of Congress in 1994 was a series of Dem incumbents retiring at the exact same time. Dems have high hopes this year, but it’s part of the formula that hasn’t quite fallen into place. That, however, may soon change. House […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}