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Speaker of the House Paul Ryan Will Not Seek Reelection

Accepted submission by -- OriginalOwner_ http://tinyurl.com/OriginalOwner at 2018-04-11 20:14:49 from the viewing-the-current-national-political-environment dept.
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Many "news" outlets are saying "Paul Ryan Retires" (Vox's original headline said that).
It's not exactly true. He'll still be there, able to do more damage to the republic and to The Working Class, until the new Congress is seated in January 2019.

Vox reports [vox.com]

More and more Republicans are looking at how the 2018 elections [vox.com] are shaping up and deciding they want no part of them--with Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) [politico.com] and Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) [tampabay.com] 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 [fivethirtyeight.com][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.

[1] Excellent use of HTML color tags, avoiding unnecessary graphics.
[2] Dup'd link in TFA.


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