There have been eleven midterm elections since 1938 when House retirements by one party outnumbered those of the other party by six or more seats. In all but one election the party with the greater number of retirements lost seats.
In the months before the 2018 election forty Republican House Members chose to give up their seats rather than pursue re-election, by far the greatest Republican exodus since the New Deal. The previous Republican record of twenty-seven was set in 1958 during the Eisenhower recession. Democrats once saw forty-one of their Members choose to depart the House in 1992 when Clinton was first elected.
However it is not the volume of a party’s retirements that matter as much as the excess of retirements from one side of the aisle or the other. To be sure, Members of Congress retire for many reasons. Age and illness catch up with the best of us. Some Members give up their House seats to seek higher office like Kyrsten Sinema and Beto O’Rourke did this year.
Still, Members also pay close attention to the winds of politics for fear they might be swept out of their seats. Some choose to retire rather than face an embarrassing defeat in the next election. Such “strategic retirements” might prove a plausible bellwether for future elections. If many more Members of one party are leaving their seats than the other, that might bode ill for the party’s results at the next election.
One thing is certain, retirements prove useless for predicting House results in Presidential election years. Presidential politics overwhelms any effect we might see for strategic retirements in House elections.
The picture looks different in midterm elections. Years that saw more Republicans retiring compared to Democrats were also years where more seats swung from Republican to Democratic hands. This past election joins 1958 as years when an excess of Republican departures from the House foretold a substantial loss of seats at the next election.
The horizontal axis measures the difference between the number of Republican Members who left the House before an election and the number of Democrats who gave up their seats.* The vertical axis shows the swing in House seats compared to the past election. For instance, in 2018 forty Republicans and eighteen Democrats left the House, for a net retirements figure of +22 Republican. The “blue wave” swung forty seats from the Republicans to the Democrats, about nine fewer than the best-fit line would predict.
Some readers might ask whether that nine-seat deficit reflected Republican gerrymandering in the years since the 2010 Census. I simply cannot say. The likely error range (the “95% confidence interval”) around the prediction for any individual year averages about a hundred seats.** With that much variability, detecting things like gerrymandering effects is simply impossible.
As a bellwether, then, retirements seem pretty useless. They appear to have so much intrinsic variability that any effects of strategic decision-making by Members remain hidden. Suppose we group elections by the difference in retirements. Will we see any stronger relationship with the election result than we have so far?
In the six elections where the number of retiring Republicans outnumbered retiring Democrats by six or more Members, the Republicans lost seats in five or them. The same held true for elections when six of more Democrats retired compared to their Republican colleagues. The Republicans gained seats in all five of those elections.
So retirements can prove a useful predictor of future election results if we limit our attention to the more extreme years where one party’s retirements outnumber the other by six or more. The party with the excess of retirements has lost ten of the eleven elections fought in such circumstances.
*The data on Congressional retirements come from the Brookings Institution’s invaluable Vital Statistics on Congress. The figure for 2018 come from the New York Times.
**The height of the bars depends on the overall “standard error of estimate,” in this case 23.8 seats, the size of the sample (21 elections), and the difference between the number of retirements in a given year and the mean for all years. The confidence intervals average about plus or minus fifty seats for any given election.
