Opening the House Retirement Floodgates: How Soon is Now?

Hot on the heels of the back-to-back-to-back retirement announcements of Republican Reps. Hastert (IL-14), Pryce (OH-15), and Pickering (MS-03), the speculation has run rampant of a potential “flood” of Republican House retirements in the coming months.  As we noted last Friday, there have actually been fewer Republican retirement announcements this year than at this point in the ’05/’06 cycle.  However, the announcements of Pryce and Pickering–both relatively younger incumbents who could have potentially enjoyed long careers in the House–were legitimate bombshells within Washington.

David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report (sub. required) takes a look at the retirement picture, and finds that while the dam hasn’t broken for Republicans yet, things are still looking grim:

Still, if history is any guide, we should expect a significant number of Republican lawmakers to call it quits in 2008 and a considerably higher incumbent retention rate for Democrats. In the vast majority of cases over the past century, when a party has suffered a major (25+ House seat) loss in a midterm election, a higher percentage of the losing party’s members have opted to step down in the succeeding presidential year. This pattern confirms the obvious: that new-found minority status provides House members less incentive to stay put.

After the last party takeover of Congress in 1994, wave-riding Republicans saw 21 in their ranks make plans to step down, while the minority Democrats saw 28 in their ranks bid farewell. Ultimately, Republicans picked off 10 open Democratic seats in the 1996 House elections, while Democrats picked up just four open GOP seats. Although Democrats held a vast advantage in scoring incumbent defeats, Republican net gain of six open seats seriously impeded Democrats’ efforts to rebound into the majority that year.

Even though the cumulative total of open seats remains fairly low at this point, Republicans are concerned about last week’s developments for reasons much broader than the emergence of three new pieces of turf to defend.

For one thing, although the August recess is one of the more popular times for members of Congress to return home to districts and announce plans, it’s no coincidence that retirement announcements to date have disproportionately come in states with some of the earlier primary filing deadlines in the country (Illinois, home to Hastert and LaHood, has a first-in-the-nation filing deadline of November 5, 2007). And, while Hastert and LaHood’s departures were at least somewhat foreseen, Pryce and Pickering’s departures were bombshells. Republicans express nervousness that additional delegations could see multiple retirements as their filing deadlines draw nearer and that additional members of the conference could drop reelection plans without much warning.

It’s also difficult to diminish the fact that the Republicans who announced retirements in the past month have been some of the most widely admired and respected members of the GOP conference during their tenures in Congress. As the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, Hastert was the unity choice of Republicans for the top post following the Gingrich-Livingston post-impeachment debacle of 1998. And as Republican Conference Secretary, Vice Chair, and Chair, and a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership, Pryce was one of the most prominent behind-the-scenes leaders of moderate House Republicans throughout her congressional career. How many of their best friends and allies in the House will decide to follow their lead? Republican campaign chiefs will have to work hard to keep this number to a minimum.

One such delegation with multiple retirements could easily be Ohio, where the smart money says that Reps. Regula and Hobson will retire in 2008.  In our last edition of the House Open Seat Watch, we offered many more possibilities, but it is worth noting that Pryce and Pickering were not even a blip on our radar a few weeks ago.

Another factor that might be of relevance is the $15 million ad campaign paid by a White House front group, targeting mostly Republican incumbents in the House and Senate and admonishing them to stay the course in Iraq.  By placing its team members between a rock (public opinion) and a hard place (the iron boot of Republican loyalty), could Ari Fleischer and friends actually inspire more incumbents to say “screw this” and jump ship?  Just a thought.