Charts of the Day: Here’s Why Republicans Are Terrified About the 2018 Midterms

Here’s a couple of fun charts to finish off the evening. They’re from Geoffrey Skelley of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and they show how many members of Congress have retired in previous midterm election cycles. First up is total retirements over time, starting at 600 days before the election and going through 75 days before the election:

As you can see, 2018 is already a huge outlier. At 300 days before the election, 52 House members had announced their retirement, breaking the all-time record held by 1978 with months still left to go. And a record number of them are from the president’s party:

There have already been 36 retirements by Republican House members, well above the previous record. This is, obviously, good news for Democrats on two fronts. First, it demonstrates a general fear among Republicans that 2018 is going to be a landslide defeat, prompting lots of them to simply give up. Second, it opens up a lot of Republican seats, making a landslide defeat even more likely. It’s a vicious circle. And that circle gets even worse when you consider the flip side: Democrats can smell the fear, and that means far more high-quality candidates are running in districts that previously had a hard time attracting people to spend time on what seemed like a hopeless cause.

And then it gets even worse, because it’s not just Congress at risk for Republicans. As Joan Walsh writes today, there’s also a huge surge of Democrats running for seats at the state level:

As we head into the first national elections since Trump’s inauguration, Democrats are talking less about “the Trump effect” than they are about “the Virginia effect”—the unprecedented surge of women, minority, and millennial candidates running for seats in their state legislatures, many in deep-red districts long written off by the Democratic Party establishment. These candidates have been buoyed by a raft of outside and resistance groups, including Indivisible, Emily’s List, Run for Something, Forward Majority, Sister District, and BlackPAC, among many others. But party leaders have also taken note of this wave and are finally beginning to invest meaningfully and systematically in local candidates.

What does it take to get young people to vote? That’s the eternal question for Democrats. But the answer might be: getting young people to run. And it doesn’t hurt to have a racist, sexist, boorish pig¹ as the leader of the opposition, does it?

¹Who, by the way, might get us all killed if he happens to get mad at something he sees on Fox & Friends some morning.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate