A Midterm Landslide Is Still No Sure Thing

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Michigan Representative Fred Upton announced on Monday that he won't run for re-election to the U.S. House this year. Upton had plenty of reasons. He's the fourth Republican who had voted to impeach former President Donald Trump to retire, although he denies that's the reason. Thanks to redistricting, he would've been running against another incumbent Republican, Bill Huizenga, in a new district that only somewhat overlapped with his old one. Republican committee term limits may also have been a factor: Upton was the chairman of the energy and commerce committee for the six years beginning in 2011 — but he had to hand over the gavel in 2017 at the onset of unified Republican government, and he would presumably not get that job back next year. At any rate, Upton will turn 69 later this month, so he's hardly retiring young.

When I last wrote about House retirements, there was a huge party imbalance, with 18 Democrats and only four Republicans heading for the exits without seeking another office. That's what one would expect during an election cycle in which just about everyone expects Republicans to win the House majority. However, some evidence pointed to other possibilities. The retiring Democrats were unusually old, even for House Democrats, suggesting that some of them simply had reached a natural retirement age. It's also the case that six of the seven senators retiring (including one, Oklahoma's Jim Inhofe, who is leaving in the middle of his term) are Republicans, and an equal number from both parties (eight each) are leaving the House to run for higher office.

Meanwhile, the recent retirements are different from those earlier in the cycle. The last 10 retirements are equally split between the parties, which has moved the ratio from 18D/4R to a somewhat less dramatic 23D/9R. Still lopsided, but less so, especially taking the Senate side into consideration. On the other hand, the recent Democratic retirements are much younger than the earlier ones, averaging only 61 years old as of the beginning of the next Congress compared to an average of 71 for the first 18. So the point about Democrats leaving for reasons other than fear of a Republican landslide might be somewhat weaker at this point. While we could see a handful of additional retirements, we're close to the end, with many filing deadlines already having passed and almost all the redistricting lines complete. Only a single member of the House announced retirement from April on in 2020 and only three in 2012, the last redistricting year. So while it's possible things could change at the last minute, perhaps the biggest development since mid-January is something that didn't happen: a flood of Democrats exiting. Without that, the number of Democrats leaving is quite moderate for a redistricting cycle, with the very small number of Republicans leaving somewhat more unusual.

It's still hard to see the overall retirement story as signaling a collapse of Democratic resources — and candidates are an important resource — during the 2022 election cycle. That this has happened even as President Joe Biden remains unpopular and the conventional wisdom is even more settled on likely Republican gains suggests that if there is a landslide, it will be a bottom-up event driven by voters opposing Biden rather than a top-down defeat caused by Democrats' disarray, hostility toward their own incumbents, or just plain fatigue. To be sure: If Biden remains unpopular, Democrats will suffer in November. But if not, I'm not seeing any strong evidence of an already-built-in Republican landslide.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.