House Democrats’ Retirements: Leading Edge of a Wave?

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: Today’s retirement announcement by Rep. Bart Gordon, a 13th-term Democrat from Tennessee, is renewing talk about a potential wave of Democratic retirements — creating open seats in districts that will provide prime pick-up opportunities for Republicans in 2010. Gordon is the fourth Democratic House member to announce in recent weeks that he’s not running for reelection, not counting those who are running for other offices instead. Those four districts — in Kansas, in Washington State, and now two in Tennessee — will provide great chances for GOP candidates, now that long-serving incumbents are out of the way. Intriguingly, the seats held by Gordon and his fellow retiring Tennessean, Rep. John Tanner, represent two of the only 21 congressional districts in the entire nation where John McCain’s vote percentage in 2008 exceeded George W. Bush’s in 2004, ABC political director David Chalian points out. Members of Congress from those districts may be more concerned about a backlash against President Obama than in places where GOP loyalty and turnout was down last year. All told, Democrats so far are going to have to defend 11 open seats next year; two of them will be filled by special elections before November 2010. (Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, is resigning to run for governor, and Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., is taking a job with a Washington-based think tank.) That gives Republicans a decent head start as they pursue the 41-seat pick-up they’d need to win back control of the House. “It’s official: Democrats now have a retirement problem,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. All four of the Democrats to announce their retirements of late were among roughly 20 on Republicans’ retirement “watch” list. That means they’ve been bombarded back in their districts — with earned and, in some cases, paid media — over their ties to Obama and the Democratic agenda in Congress. Still, a quick spin through the numbers suggests that it’s not time for panic mode for Democrats just yet. Republicans actually will be defending more open seats of their own: 12 House Republicans and counting are leaving office next year; all of them are pursuing other offices. That list includes three House districts — in Delaware, Illinois, and Pennsylvania — that President Obama won handily last year. Democrats are reasonably confident about their chances in all three, and say they will find strong candidates in all of the Democratic-held seats being vacated. “We are confident that a Democrat who shares Chairman Gordon’s commitment to putting progress before partisanship on behalf of Middle Tennessee will succeed him as the next Representative of Tennessee’s 6th District,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement today. But the independent political analyst Charlie Cook disagrees. He quickly moved Gordon’s seat into the “likely Republican” column, calling it Democrats’ “most problematic open seat yet.” He ranks it alongside six other open seats that will be difficult for Democrats to hold on to. Republicans rightly point out that Democratic retirements played a major role in the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress. That year, 28 Democrats decided not to seek additional terms; another 28 retired two years later, in part out of frustration over having lost the majority. Similarly, 22 GOP retirements in the 2006 cycle helped Democrats take over Congress. Thirty more announced their retirements before the 2008 election, helping Democrats pad their majority. This year, Democrats say they are hedging against retirements with aggressive recruitment efforts in open-seat efforts. And they’re also guarding against a storyline about Democratic retirements foretelling Democratic disaster. "We are not asleep at the switch as we were" going into 1994, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told a group of reporters earlier this month. "I don't think we're going to lose the majority — I'm pretty confident of that. Again, because our members are not sleeping at this point in time."