Midterm elections are generally seen as being unfavorable to the incumbent president’s party. For example, Republicans made large gains during the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections during the Obama administration, while Democrats won back the House in the 2018 midterms during the Trump administration. So to see five Republicans (and counting) announcing retirement in the 2022 election cycle is extremely unusual and surprising.
Currently, each party holds 50 seats in the Senate, with Democrats having the majority since Vice President Kamala Harris, who has the role of being the president of the Senate, can break ties and thus give her party the majority. Barring any special elections cropping up, there will be 34 seats up for election or reelection in the 2022 election. 14 of these seats are held by Democrats and 20 are held by Republicans. (Note that only one of Georgia’s Senate seats will be up for reelection—Democrat Raphael Warnock’s seat.)
Currently, five Republicans have already announced retirement. They are Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio, Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Richard Shelby of Alabama. No Democrats have currently announced retirement.
Now, with the exception of Shelby, who has already served six terms in the Senate and is already 86 years old, every other retiring Republican has only served two terms (three in the case of Burr). And we could be seeing two other potential Republican retirements too: Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who is 87 years old and is seen as a likely retirement (he has said he would announce whether or not he would seek reelection at a later date) and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin previously said that he would retire in 2022 and that it is his “preference” to leave office in 2022, although he is still undecided.
If both of these senators retire, we could be seeing up to seven open races for the Republican Party to defend. On the contrary, the only realistic retirement on the Democrats’ side is probably Sen. Patrick Leahy’s seat, who has represented Vermont in the Senate since 1974 and is already 80, but this seat is practically guaranteed for the Democrats—Vermont is one of the most Democratic states in the country.
Open elections are typically much more competitive than races with an incumbent. In fact, an open race can make a typically safe state for a certain party somewhat competitive.
The incumbency advantage can be a significant boost to a candidate’s platform since they already have name recognition and usually have access to more financial resources and party finance (especially true for primary election challengers). This partially explains why no incumbent presidents have lost reelection between George H.W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 and Donald Trump’s defeat last November. Many voters, seeing a name they recognize, will be more inclined to vote for that person since they already have a general idea of that politician’s record while they were in office. This makes an election with an incumbent basically a referendum on whether or not voters thought they did a good job while in office.
On the contrary, in an open election, no one has a record they can use to back themselves, and so voters will be looking at candidates’ stances on various issues and how they expect them to perform. With generally unknown candidates being pitted against one another, people will choose the person they are more familiar with. This can explain why a Senate race was competitive in Kansas back in November—the incumbent had retired.
Having established that open elections are generally worse for the incumbent party, let’s examine the possible reasons why a senator might seek retirement. Excluding Alabama, where the senator is very old and the GOP is likely to have no problem whatsoever in retaining the seat, there are a number of reasons why a senator might seek retirement even if they are not very old.
The most obvious reason is that politicians do not like losing. When a politician chooses to retire from his own accord, at least for the record books, he or she can easily say that they themselves, rather than the voters, decided when to leave office, and that they never lost an election bid. Losing an election means that voters have rejected you, which is generally not a very good look.
But why would so many senators retire in a year that is generally seen as favorable to the Republicans? Throughout history, midterm elections have generally seen the party without a president in office (i.e., the Republicans in 2022) do significantly better than the incumbent president’s party, and in the last two midterm elections during the first term of a president, they all oversaw their party losing a trifecta in the government. Based on history alone, it is safe to assume that 2022 will see the GOP do quite well.
The clear reason is that we are not living in normal times (surprise, surprise). We are currently living through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that has already seen 29 million Americans infected and killed over 530,000 of them. However, we are currently seeing cases decline at a rapid rate and vaccine rollout is occurring at a rapid, rapid pace: data from The New York Times indicates that at least 19 percent of Americans already have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and of the whole population, 10 percent have already been fully vaccinated.
Although it is undeniable that the Trump administration did contribute to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, ultimately, it was the Biden administration that oversaw the mass deployment of the vaccine to the public. In fact, vaccine rollout in the U.S. is among the best of any country, and President Biden recently announced that his administration is aiming to make the vaccine fully available to all Americans over the age of 16 by May.
And with Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill being passed by Congress on Wednesday and signed into law by Biden on Thursday, the economy is sure to recover and the pandemic will likely have been brought under control by 2022. This means that the Biden administration and the Democratic Party will be able to take credit for bringing a massive pandemic under control and helping the economy rebound after a major financial crisis.
This means that the 2022 midterms will likely not be as bad for the Democratic Party as we may think, and many GOP senators are beginning to see this harsh reality too, and are choosing to retire instead of facing an election loss.
Therefore, we are likely to see hugely competitive races in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio, and Missouri will probably be somewhat competitive, too—in 2016, Democrat Jason Kander lost election to incumbent Roy Blunt (who is retiring) by just about two percent.
With so many pickup opportunities for the Democrats and relatively few for the Republicans (the only competitive races with Democratic incumbents are Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada), the 2022 midterms will likely not be as bad for the Democrats as so many people expect.