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posted by fyngyrz on Thursday April 12 2018, @08:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the they're-all-ryan-through-their-smiles dept.

Many media outlets are saying "Paul Ryan Retires" (For example, Vox's original headline.) This doesn't mean he won't still be there until the new Congress is seated in January 2019.

Vox reports:

More and more Republicans are looking at how the 2018 elections are shaping up and deciding they want no part of them--with Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) just the latest to announce they won't run for reelection this year.

This makes 25 House Republicans and three GOP senators who are calling it quits, not counting several more who are stepping down to run for another political office (or who have already resigned). That's the highest such number[1] for just one party in decades.

Revealingly, only nine House Democrats and zero Democratic senators have so far made the same choice. (Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota resigned due to scandal, but his seat has already been filled by Tina Smith, who will run this fall.) That's a dramatic discrepancy.

Though the explanations offered for these decisions differ, and though many of these GOP-held seats are in no real danger of flipping to Democrats, these retirements are revealing how members of Congress currently view the national political environment. That is: they think there's a real possibility of a Democratic wave.

But the trend is more meaningful even than that. These very retirements could help make such a wave even bigger, because it's generally easier for the opposition party to flip open seats than it is to knock off incumbents.

[...] According to FiveThirtyEight's numbers,[2] the only time in the past 40 years there's been a bigger partisan discrepancy in [the who's not running for reelection stats] was 2008, which turned out to be a Democratic wave year.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @11:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @11:48PM (#666250)

    Our economy is booming again. This is not "declining".

    The world can turn against us, and that is fine. Of the large economies (we being largest) we are the least oriented toward international trade. We are best able to go it alone.

    You seem to desire "no nation claiming the empire title". That should be "no nation able to challenge our empire title".

    Accepting defeat is sick. Shame on you for the idea that we would "have gently slid from empire to average country". The only problem with American exceptionalism is that some people spend too much time believing it and not enough time fighting for it. We can and should fight for absolute dominance.

    The generation leaving high school right now is abnormally alt-right. You're in for a ride if you think population trends might go in your favor. Part of this is that the young like to change the status quo, and today that pushes many to the right. Part of it is that the average family is far to the right of the average person; this is because liberals don't raise families much.

    FYI, I'm alt-right and I have 11 kids. Most are to the right of me. Only one of them, a girl, is even slightly at risk of doing the whole vegan cat lady thing. A bunch of them make normal alt-right people look like leftist cucks.