Is An Election Vibe Shift Underway?
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Elliot, what are you doing to manage your poison ivy? It would be giving you too much information, Galen.

I have taken a few baths in oatmeal. That's all I'll say. You've taken a bath in oatmeal? A few, more than a few. It really helps. I sort of imagined you like, you know when you drop your iPhone in water and then you have to put it in a bag of rice? I imagine that like you're the iPhone in this situation just sitting in a bag of oatmeal.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. As we hit record on this very podcast, former President Donald Trump is about five miles away from where I sit at a courthouse in Lower Manhattan. The question at hand is when the Stormy Daniels hush money case will go to trial. It was scheduled to begin today, but is now expected to start in mid-April.

The broader question, though, for our purposes is whether the dynamics of the presidential race are beginning to shift. Maybe it's due to Trump's baggage and legal quandaries or President Biden hitting the campaign trail in earnest or the State of the Union or something else.

But at the beginning of this month, Trump was performing 10 points better than Biden in net approval rating. Today, that advantage has fallen to just four points. So we're going to talk about what is going on. We're also going to talk about all these congressional retirements. So far, 48 members of the House, or 11% of the entire body, have announced that they are hanging up their hat.

Is this normal or is it a reaction to a dysfunctional workplace? And we've got a good or bad use of polling example today. A poll showing Republican Larry Hogan leading his Democratic opponents in the Maryland Senate race by double digits got a lot of headlines last week, where the headlines missing some key information. Here with me to discuss it all is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Thanks for having me.

Great to have you. Also here with us is Director of Data Analytics, Elliot Morris. Welcome, Elliot. Yo, Galen. What's going on? Not too much, you know, settling into the week. And also here with us is AP reporter Leah Askaranam. I should mention, in case you noticed, Leah has a new title because she has a new job. Congratulations on the new job, Leah. Thank you.

All right, let's begin with our good or bad use of polling example. Last week, a Washington Post University of Maryland poll found former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan ahead of Democratic rival Representative David Trone by 12 points and ahead of Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks by 14 points. And this is in Maryland's overpoll.

open Senate race. This is in a state that Joe Biden won by more than 30 points in 2020. Hogan's lead grabbed headlines across the political media, but his position might not be as strong as it seems. The same poll found that 55 percent of voters in Maryland want Democrats to control the Senate compared to 35 percent who want Republican control.

So what should we make of this conflict in the data? And is this a good or bad use of polling? Leah, as a Marylander, we're going to have you kick us off. What do you say? Good or bad use of polling? A Marylander. Are you not a Marylander? Do you identify more as a Chevy Chaser? No. Or no, a Bethesda-er, Bethesda-er. No, shh, don't tell people. Okay, that's...

It's a fine use of polling, getting a head-to-head in a Senate race at this point. Like, I'm just happy we have data when we don't have data in individual states, like when we see presidential polling and don't see a head-to-head Senate poll. Like, that is what annoys me. That is what a bad use of polling is. This is a fine use of polling to gauge results.

the moment to gauge, you know, as we say, a snapshot in time. But I don't think it's a good use of predictive polling. And that's, I think, partially because of what you just spoke about, Galen, about the difference between when it comes to federal elections, voters deciding whether they want to vote for the person or the party, because people do realize that when they're voting for Larry Hogan for governor of Maryland, that is

just voting for Larry Hogan as governor of Maryland, a Republican. Larry Hogan for Senate means likely a Republican Senate. If you look especially at like the favorable, unfavorable ratings, like Larry Hogan starts at a strong point and his Democratic opponents start largely unknown. One of them is going to be known by the end, right? By the end of this cycle.

Right, because we should say that the race hasn't been clarified yet. We know Larry Hogan is the Republican, but we don't know who the Democrat is going to be. Not sure we know that, but... Oh, okay. Go ahead, Nathaniel. Well, the primary is on May 14th. There has been this very competitive Democratic primary between Trone and also Brooks. Larry Hogan is certainly the most prominent Republican in the field, but as an anti-Trumper, I don't think we should assume that he's going to have a clear path in the primary. So, TBD.

We should say here that he's popular with Republicans in the state. When we talk about an anti-Trumper, sometimes we're talking about folks like Mike Pence or Chris Christie who are upside down when it comes to how they're viewed by Republicans. They're underwater, so to say. But

According to this exact same poll, Larry Hogan is popular statewide amongst all voters and also specifically popular with Republicans. So whether you want to categorize him as anti-Trump or not, I would probably say he is anti-Trump.

He is still popular amongst the voters who would be voting in a Republican primary. And the one poll we do have in the primary for whatever it's worth, it's a few months old or it's about a month old at this point, does have Hogan winning by about 30 points. So something would have to be... I think we can fairly say something would be... It would be pretty surprising if he lost, but not impossible. Nathaniel? So what do we make, though, of this contradiction where voters...

look at this question and they say, I'm going to vote for Larry Hogan. But then they're asked, who do you want to control the Senate? And they say, Democrats. Is it like their ideal world is a world in which the Senate is controlled by Democrats, but Larry Hogan is also there? Or like, are those two things going to come together? And ultimately the national partisanship angle, which is Democrats control the Senate, vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is, wins out.

Well, I think that this is a bad use of polling. Ooh, there we go. If you're looking at the top line. Okay. And I'm not dodging your question. I will tie it in, I promise. Definitely it's a bad use of headlines. I'll say the headline from The Hill where they asked the sort of rhetorical question, blue state turning red. It's like, obviously you're leaning too much on one single poll if that's going to be your headline. And I wouldn't have written that headline because...

The rationalization that's going on in voters' minds when you have one option that's very well-known against other options that aren't well-known at all, and you're six months before an election, it's not the same thought process that they're going to have.

on election day. You know, if about half of Marylanders don't even know who the leading Democratic opponent is, David Trone, then they're not, like, sampling their election day opinion right now. They're sampling something else. Name recognition,

some amount of vibes. And so in that view, it's some, you know, it's like reconcilable that the top line poll would be showing something different than the poll about Senate control, which is sort of pulling from knowledge that's probably a little closer than the knowledge people will be pulling on election day. That's my take. But I will say that when you look at this poll, it's not as if so many people are

are reporting themselves as not knowing who they're going to vote for, that no one hits 50 percent. Right. Larry Hogan is at 49 percent against one of the challengers and 50 percent against one of the other challengers. So you have a situation where clearly a lot of independents or maybe even Democrats are saying, I understand that he's going to face a Democrat eventually, but I'm voting for Larry Hogan. I mean, does this mean that

Democrats are going to have to do a lot of work to turn that around, like spending in ads? Or do you think national partisanship is just going to set in in such a way that this poll ultimately is rendered not all that relevant as we get closer?

If you looked at me like looking distracted, it's because of course, looking at the 2018 Tennessee Senate race with Bill Bredesen, Democrat who was very popular among Republicans as the race started early polling in that 2018 Senate race had him leading now Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican. In Tennessee, we saw Marsha Blackburn eventually resign.

to comfortably defeat Phil Bredesen. The early polling was helpful in knowing that it's not because Phil Bredesen was personally unpopular. The early polling showed him leading because people knew him and liked him. And they say, hey, would you vote for him? And people who like him are like, sure. And then come election day, they're like, oh, wait, this is the Senate race. And there has been, you know, at that point, a lot of spending in the race against him. It's become a real battle.

I think it's important to have these numbers because it's a helpful reminder of the power of partisanship at the end of the day, even if they're not going to tell us the results of the Senate race. Do you think then that the Senate race in Maryland is solid D?

I think you move it into the likely category to acknowledge that there is real competition. When you put out the solid designation means like there's no real competition to be had. I think that you acknowledge that there's a popular person in it by moving it one degree over. But this poll would not make me change my rating if I were in a political handicapper world right now. It would

I would expect that this would be the early data and knowing how historically these races change, keep it in that category, knowing how, you know, the race is going to continue.

While we're on the topic of the Senate, I do want to bring up some other recent Senate news. So last week in the Republican primary in the Ohio Senate race, Bernie Moreno defeated his opposition. He got actually just barely over 50 percent of the vote in that primary. He was endorsed by Donald Trump. So a pretty resounding victory compared to polls that showed, you know, a somewhat competitive race ultimately. And

And I think there's been some suggestion that as the more Trump aligned candidate, he would be weaker against Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown. Is it clear that that's the case? I mean, I know Democrats were sort of supporting him in subtle ways, but what do we make of where that race stands now that we know who is actually going to be facing off against Sherrod Brown?

I think that Republicans nominating Moreno increases the odds that Brown wins, that Democrats keep their seat in Ohio. And I think that because in 2022, in the midterms, we saw that there was a punishment in general elections for Republican candidates who seemed very close to Trump ideologically and sort of embraced Trump.

were even used as a campaign tool, his false claims that the election was stolen from him in 2020. So a candidate like Moreno kind of fits that bill. So we should expect some residual underperformance. You know, there's the obvious question that are candidates in a midterm more likely to punish people than the voters that you see in a presidential election? Maybe. We can't really assess that, I think, empirically. But...

I do think Marino is weaker than the other candidates. And I think that the, you know, some of the Democrats who were like taking ads out against Marino saw that and probably made the right decision. None of that's to say I think Sherrod Brown is likely or not to lose his seat. I think it's a really, really close race. And maybe more to the point, if Republicans had picked a different candidate, then maybe, you know, then it would be more likely that Democrats were going to lose the Senate.

Yeah, I'm not sure that Moreno is a particularly weak candidate. He might be TBD, right? I mean, you look at someone like Herschel Walker, who was maybe kind of similar. I mean, he was a celebrity in Georgia, but

It turned out that he had skeletons in the closet. I guess we already knew that. We knew that going in, but there were more skeletons in the closet. And I think that's always a risk with someone like Moreno, who is kind of a political novice, like Frank LaRose, who was one of the alternatives, had run for office before. You always want to be more experienced of a candidate. They tend to be stronger candidates.

I think it was more about the alternatives in that race, like Dolan, Moreno's main competition in the end was pretty moderate. So I think he would have had a fair amount of independent support. So he actually would have been an actively strong candidate for Republicans in the general. So I think it's more about the strength of Dolan and to a lesser extent, LaRose than Moreno's weakness inherently. Although again, I think...

The point is, I mean, we already had this kind of strange story about his email being used on an adult website. There could be more where that comes from, right? But we don't know. But I wouldn't say that he is a Carrie Lake or like Doug Mastriano level bad candidate in terms of being really, truly ideologically extreme. We're going to have to see how that plays out. The Moreno-Brown matchup makes it a pretty clear cut matchup.

question of whether Ohio is a Trump Republican state through and through at this point. And I think it's possible if we see Moreno win, it

It doesn't matter, right? Like, it doesn't matter if it was Dolan or I mean, I think you can see that as a pretty strong sign that against somebody like Sherrod Brown, if Bernie Moreno wins, that's solidifying what we know to be the Republican Party in Ohio, no longer kind of the DeWine party.

Republican brand. And yes, like J.D. Vance's election was a signal that the brand of Republican Party in Ohio has ultimately sided with Trump. So I think it's possible if Ohio is a red state now and it's a red state in a Trumpy way, which I think is the way of red states right now, then I don't think it really matters who the nominee is. If it ends up being super close or

or if Sherrod Brown wins, then yeah, I think it's a sign that maybe Democrats won't completely give up on Ohio. There are layers of questions here. Ellie, you already mentioned one, which is that does the midterm electorate look different enough from...

a presidential electorate, that they're more inclined to punish candidates for these sort of weaknesses. Whereas when the population of the electorate grows significantly, they're more just focused on the R or D. And there's maybe more Trump supporters in that larger electorate. And so they're going to, far from punish candidates like this, actually support them.

There's that question. And then there's also the question of Ohio specifically, which is that Trump won Ohio twice by about eight points after voting for Barack Obama twice and being the quintessential Democrat.

battleground state. And so I think the Republican Party there actively likes Trump as opposed to likes Republicans, but is generally a little bit more wary of Trump-aligned candidates. So in fact, maybe the question is, is the Trump brand, you know, an asset? Yep.

It's maybe a little more complicated than that. But yeah, I think, Leah, you were maybe getting at that a little bit. Yeah, it's like these two states are just – I was thinking about the Herschel Walker comparison. Two states that are going in – that might kind of meet in the middle in terms of where its partisanship is at the moment but coming from opposite directions. So if we're looking at a state that's like Ohio that's traditionally been purple and we think kind of white working class voters who previously supported Obama moved to Trump –

At some point, you'd imagine that Ohio would become out of reach, whereas Georgia is becoming within reach, right? Historically red and now purple, largely because of those very suburban Republicans who might be okay with somebody in their case. If these Georgia suburban independents were living in Ohio, maybe they would have liked Dolan instead of Moreno, but they live in Georgia. So, you know? Yeah.

Speaking of these kinds of shifting dynamics, let's move on and talk about the potentially shifting dynamics in the 2024 presidential race. Emphatic question mark at the end of that. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.

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As I mentioned at the top, over the past three weeks, Biden's approval rating has improved by a couple points. He is now above 40% approval for the first time in a while.

Well, Trump's favorability has declined. He's still faring better than Biden on that question, but his advantage in this metric has been halved. The Biden campaign has been saying for a while that once the two nominating contests are over and voters come to terms with Biden and Trump being the two options, that Trump's advantage in the race would diminish.

So is that what's happening? Is it something else? Is it as simple as the State of the Union? After all, we haven't necessarily seen the same shift in the head-to-head polling that we've seen in just the favorable numbers. Let's kick things off with you, Elliot. What's going on here as far as you're concerned?

Yeah, I think the most plausible explanation is probably vibes-based, if I'm being totally honest. The reason I put it this way instead of calling it a State of the Union bump or something is because I don't think enough voters watch the State of the Union to decide affirmatively, oh, Biden isn't as old as I thought he was, or what have you. But I do think that there's been a bit of a feedback loop in the media and in news coverage of Biden

enough to potentially lift his numbers or put another way to not suppress them, to not be pushing them down because of a tone of coverage. You can add on top of that maybe his attempts to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza, which buy him a little bit of credit among his potential Democratic supporters to say they don't approve of him. And

and an increase in nude coverage of Trump. And I think that's enough to move the needle by like a percentage or so. It's important to remember there's not a game-changing increase in popularity for him. 44, 45, and then he's favored to win the election. But going from, you know, 39 to 41 is kind of like, you know, something changed, but... Something changed, but you're still losing. But you're still losing not so much popularity

to really, you know, change how the country views you. What do you think about the fact that we haven't seen a similar shift in head-to-head national polling? So here's where you do have to get a little cross-tab divey. Oh, no. We talked about this last week. But you do have to, you have to kind of start reading into the numbers a little bit.

And if you do that, you'll notice that Biden's approval rating for the past year and a half, he does poorly with independents and swing voters and what have you. And that's really important. But he also does poorly with people you'd assume would say they approve of him. Now, that's liberals and young people, but it's also just Democrats at large. His approval is lower among Democrats now than Trump's was among Republicans at this point in 2020. So if you assume that like...

this group of people who would be voting for Biden or who say they're going to vote for him anyway, despite their disapproval, are suddenly maybe somewhat approving of him, then you would see a change in their evaluation of the president without...

really changing the November race. Now, that's just like, that's just the theory. We kind of have to cram our theory into the numbers. And when we do that, we risk over-interpretation. And so, to counter that, right, you also have to acknowledge that Joe Biden's favorability ratings haven't changed since the State of the Union election.

over the past couple of months. You mean his head-to-head hasn't changed? No, his favorability. His favorability rating hasn't changed. His approval rating has. So that brings up a question. The big question here is like, what are these surveys measuring? Horse race numbers might not change if the horse race doesn't change. So we're saying here that...

People who were previously saying, I don't really like the job that he's doing, but I'm going to vote for him anyway, are now saying, some small percentage of them are saying, I now like the job that he's doing, and I was always going to vote for him anyway. Yeah. Or they're stuck in the unsure category still for the general election or the not voting category. Yeah. Something like that. Okay. Okay. Does everyone agree with this dumpster dive? Sorry, I mean, cross-tab diving. Okay.

Ooh, got it. Did you do that on purpose or is that a genuine Freudian slip? Come on, Nathaniel. Of course I did it on purpose. I'm a professional.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a plausible theory. I think that there was always some reason to think that after the primary was over, as the race crystallized between Biden and Trump, that the troops would rally around Biden, the Democratic troops, and maybe his ratings would go up. And as Trump got more scrutiny and people realized he was going to be the nominee, his ratings might go down. I think that remains a plausible explanation for this.

That said, I also think just simple noise is also a very plausible explanation. And this isn't really a shift that I would be taking note of at this point. Didn't you literally take note of it? When?

When? I'm pretty sure. Didn't you tweet? Biden is above 40% for the first time in a long time. Nathaniel, you literally, quite literally took note of it. Totally. I got to get the sweet, sweet retweets, Galen. Oh, you best believe I will be fact-checking your tweets on this podcast, Nathaniel.

His approval rating has changed like two to three points. And I think that's out of, like probabilistically it's not zero. Yeah, but it's also not like inconsistent with like sometimes his approval rating just like kind of like goes up and down. And like if you look closely on the kind of timescale we're looking at, which is a few weeks, like he's had, you know, like little dips and spikes like this before. So it's not something that would really jump out at me normally.

Ariel Edwards-Levy, who is the polling person over at CNN, has a very kind of good piece of wisdom, which is that, like, if there is an actual meaningful shift in the polls, like, it's going to be obvious, right? Like, it's going to be...

larger than fluctuations that you normally see on a day-to-day basis. Like obviously when Biden's approval rating went underwater after Afghanistan, like that was obvious. It was clear something was going on there. So I'm just like, I'm not convinced that anything is going on here. I would be equally surprised or unsurprised if Biden's approval rating goes back down to like 38% in a few weeks, or if it continues to rise by a couple of points because the polarization that I mentioned post-primary is indeed setting in.

So I'll say this is one of the biggest shifts in approval ratings that we've seen in a year. Like if I'm going back to March of 2023...

It depends on where you're starting from. From the beginning of the year, it's been relatively static. There was a moment where it hit 39.8%. So I guess Nathaniel doesn't round in his tweets, but there was a 39.8% moment in February of this year. And if you look at like the trend from starting in March of 2023, it's like a little different.

I mean, the overall trend line is going down, barely. But if we're looking at, I mean, just here's some numbers. What's today's date? Today's March 25th. On March 25th of 2023, we have his approval rating at 538 at 42.3%.

So it's a 2% drop, but it's also a 2% gain since the beginning of the month. So I think we just have to wait and see.

We just have to. Oh, do we? Is that how these things work? We'll know if this was real soon enough. But all that said, I still think it's worth noting that like this is the same thing that we just talked about with the Maryland Senate race. Like things are probably going to shift before November. I'm not saying that Biden's approval rating is going to soar. Actually, his approval rating might stay the same and his favorability might increase or the head to his performance and head to heads might change.

increase because we're in this weird time in politics where maybe approval rating doesn't always show you final results. I don't really know. Again, wait and see. But just because this might not be a massive shift right now doesn't mean that this is going to be the dynamic for the next six months.

Yeah, let's talk about the other side of this equation for a second, which is Donald Trump. I think there it's a little more noisy. Like you could chalk it up to noise if you wanted to. It's not as clear of a shift in his favorability rating, but ultimately things have gotten slightly worse for him.

Does it seem like this shift in the news cycle from competitive primary in which he's beating his opponents in the Republican contests by a whole lot to...

Okay.

is this sort of new news cycle the kinds of thing we would expect to change the dynamics of a race? Or is this just stuff that feeds into, we all know Donald Trump very well at this point. These are the exact kind of things that people already know about him and have already priced in. It's not a new scandal or anything like that. So it's not even going to change anything.

I think it changes things. I mean, the other way to analyze the approval rating numbers, instead of just looking at the actual numbers and comparing them a couple weeks ago, is to look at how the trend in the numbers has changed, right? Like the derivative of the numbers. Sorry if you get super mathy. And Nathaniel, you know, makes a good point. Biden was on a negative trend before Afghanistan, and it became sharply more negative in the

after. Usually we would say that's a punctuation. Something caused that. In 2022, he was on a negative trend essentially until the Inflation and Reduction Act passed. And then it became somewhat more positive. That's a positive bill. That's a movement you would expect. Bringing us up to date, right? The trend in Biden's approval for most of 2022 was

somewhat counterintuitively up until around October, around the time that Hamas attacks Israel and we're somewhat involved in a conflict. His approval was negative. Now it's either positive or stable. And that is a difference in how the campaign is perceived. And it matches our difference in how the campaign has been covered.

For all we say about how voters are stuck in their partisan camps, news coverage still impacts politics and it impacts perceptions. There is some level of the media leading voters. The role for the media is definitely diminished over time, but it still has a positive coefficient, we'd say. So in that context, I think that this recent increase makes sense. And if you project that forward, which again is dicey, but just hypothetically, if you

an increase in cadence of coverage of Trump rather than Biden would produce trends that go in the same direction. I think there's plenty of evidence for this.

The question is less whether anything that happens between now and November will change voters' minds about whether or not they like Donald Trump. It's more like, do voters get reminded of how they felt when Trump was in the limelight? Are they going to start getting tired of the daily drama?

Because we've been able to kind of forget about it for a while. I mean, it's been in the background slightly, but I mean, if you look at Trump's favorability when he was getting indicted a bunch last summer, I mean, his favorability hit like an all time low.

low post January 6th, right around the time that he was getting indicted. I think his third case, it was like net negative 18. And so when people are reminded, as much as we say, like I suggested, it could be priced into a certain extent when people are reminded about this stuff and the drama, as you say, they react to it.

And now that Trump has officially kind of won enough delegates to clinch the nomination, it's no longer the idea of Trump. It's real now. And now I think we're also going to see a lot more coverage of his daily events because he is the nominee. He is newsworthy. Yeah, he's newsworthy. Remember when we had that whole news cycle where we were wondering whether CNN should have Trump on TV?

In general, because media outlets didn't want to give him a platform, it's like he's the nominee. He has a platform. And I know he's not officially the nominee, but he has enough delegates. So I'm just – for our purposes, he's the nominee.

And now that he's has this platform, I mean, in one sense, that's like what makes Trump who he is, you know, like being able to kind of direct the media story of the day. But it's also a potential weakness because it means it's no longer just kind of like the idea of a kind of the entertainer in chief. It's the every single day news about, you know, debating if he did something wrong or

and then covering his response to whatever that event was. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of the drama, perhaps the drama is back when it comes to the presidential race, but it has gone nowhere when it comes to the House. And so is all of that drama causing some retirements?

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With 10 months to go before the 118th Congress ends, 48 House members have either left or announced plans to leave Congress voluntarily.

One of the 11 percent of the House of Representatives that has bailed so far is Republican Representative from Colorado Ken Buck. When he was asked for his reasoning behind his resignation, he told CNN, quote, It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I've been in Congress. And having talked to former members, it's the worst year in the 40 to 50 years to be in Congress.

So are these retirements normal, or is there something to what Buck is saying? Have things in Congress gotten so bad that members just don't even want to be there? Nathaniel, you have reported on this. You've crunched the data. So let's start with you. How abnormal is this 11% number, and how high might we expect it to rise, given that, by all accounts, we're probably not done with retirement announcements?

Right, exactly. I don't know exactly how much we can expect it to rise, but I think we can expect it to rise by at least a few because actually most states, I believe, still the filing deadline still hasn't passed. So there is still plenty of time for people to retire or as Ken Buck and Mike Gallagher did in the last couple of weeks, just canceling.

resign and say basically like, you know, my time is better spent doing something else than even to serve out the rest of the term, which I think is part of what is fueling this narrative in particular, that people aren't just retiring, they are resigning, which is different. Retiring means you're not running for re-election and you're served to the end of the year. But resigning is basically being like, I am quitting effective, you know, two weeks from now or whatever it is.

And to significant consternation to the Republican caucus because they have such a slim majority already. Like, these are people who are resigning knowing that it will put their colleagues in a pretty rough spot. Right, exactly. With Gallagher's resignation, which is going to be effective on April 19th, and Republicans aren't going to get a new member until the Kevin McCarthy special election on May 21st,

Because of that, they're going to be down to it's going to be a three seat majority for Republicans 217 to 214, which means that they can only afford one Republican defection to Republicans defecting to join the Democrats will sink a bill. So, you know, if you thought it was difficult for Mike Johnson to kind of corral his caucus before, it's it's going to get even harder. And, you know, basically, I don't think you can expect anything to get done.

To your question, Galen, about whether this level of departure from Congress is abnormal, it is high, but it is not unprecedented. So there were actually more people leaving Congress back in the 2018 election cycle and then also in 2022 by a fairly significant number. So there were 68 departures in 2018 and 60 in 2022. And again, I think we can expect the 48 to rise. And let's say, for argument's sake, that it ends up at like

or something like that. Like that would be kind of approaching those numbers, but it wouldn't quite match that. That said, there were special circumstances in those years. So 2022 was a redistricting cycle that tends to kind of shuffle things around. People maybe not have districts to run in anymore. And so they're leaving Congress for that reason. 2018 also was just saw a lot of resignations in particular. That was the cycle

of the MeToo scandal and four representatives resigned as a result of that. He also had four representatives resign to join Trump's administration at the beginning of 2017. So there were kind of some external factors there.

I think also you see a higher level of resignations at a midterm that you expect your party to lose. You're like, I'm not even going. Like, I currently sit in a competitive seat. I don't think I'm going to win this race anyway. The writing is on the wall. I'm just going to bow out. So that's true for retirements. I'm not sure that's true for resignations.

To Elliot's point earlier, like there is the most recent isolated trend and then there's the broader trend. I mean, do we see that over time we are seeing more and more retirements and resignations from Congress?

In the long term, we're kind of in a period of a lot of congressional retirements, basically the most since like the early 90s. So this isn't like an historically unprecedented time for departures from Congress, but it is definitely it is higher than it was, say, in the 2000s and at the beginning of the last decade, the 2010s.

That does seem to have coincided with the election of Donald Trump. We've seen a lot of Republicans head for the exits who were maybe part of the old Republican Party, just a lot of turnover within the GOP. I wrote an article a couple of years ago that maybe we should update just about that.

The Republicans who existed in Washington in 2016, like only a small fraction of them are still around, whether because they lost re-election or because they chose to leave voluntarily. But yeah, we are in a period of time where it seems like people are not...

thrilled about being in Congress. There are better ways to spend their time. This specific session, although obviously there's been a lot of dramatic things happening with the ouster of Kevin McCarthy and just how hard it is to get things passed in this very narrow majority, hasn't been a record breaker. It was just kind of part of this multi-year trend.

Well, and there's one more way of measuring this, which is how long people stick around in Congress before they get the hell out. And you wrote in your article, the type of member who is leaving Congress is changing that 40 to 50 percent of those that departed Congress served less than 10 years, and that during the 110th Congress, by comparison, that number was 11 percent. So it's

younger members, maybe in some cases, even rising stars like Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who's, you know, only 40 and was seen as a serious legislator, are like, no, thanks.

Right, exactly. And it's actually not age specifically. I looked at that and the share of members who are retiring before the age of 60 has actually been constant. It's specifically people who are retiring earlier in their careers who are saying, I don't want to stick around this place. People who are only serving like gallery or, you know, four terms or something like that. And I think that is interesting. And it also has obviously kind of concerning implications because institutional memory is important in Congress. There are a lot of

A lot of arcane things to learn about passing a law in addition to obviously the fact that Congress really runs on seniority. And so the fact that people aren't sticking around to build up that seniority is concerning. Leah, I know you spent a lot of time covering Congress. Is this enough to say that there's something of like a brain drain in Congress? What's the sense amongst House members themselves?

This weekend, Kevin McCarthy, former speaker, appeared on one of the Sunday shows and was asked basically this question, like, are people leaving because they can't stand it? I'm paraphrasing. He kind of dodged the question. I think there was a bit of an admission that, yes, it's a hard place to be right now. Part of that is just, you know, the fact that it's such a slim majority.

Members of Congress quit, like Nathaniel said, or retire before they...

they're going to be in the minority party, right? Like if they see a wave coming, they'll just resign sometimes because being in the minority, and I think House members will tell you this, just really isn't fun. So I think what we're seeing is that right now there's kind of like a similar feeling with having such a narrow majority and also adding to that that a faction of the party that historically has not had a ton of power now has all of the power.

And that everybody has all the power, right? That's what happens when you have a narrow majority. I mean, we talked about this a lot in the last Senate when it's like, well, it's Joe Manchin's vote determines everything or Sinema's vote determines anything. And it could be anyone. As much as we put it all on Joe Manchin and Sinema, it was like, it could have been Tim Kaine if he wanted to, right? Like anybody, anybody.

can seize power in those moments. I think the resignation versus retirement dynamic is a really important one. I think of it as kind of like if you're retiring, it's like quitting a job, but quitting because your spouse is moving or because you got a better offer, whereas resigning is like you're a day before a deadline and you're on a group project and you just throw

throw the papers up in the air and slam the door. Right? It's like, I'm done. This analysis seems like it's been given, it's being given by somebody who's familiar with the modern workplace. I've had a lot of jobs. But,

But the resignation thing, it's something to read into. I think this is also, again, part of what we were talking about with Ohio. This is just a transformative moment for the Republican Party where the party is being reformed in the image of Donald Trump. It's been happening for a while, but it happens faster in the House because there are shorter terms available.

And I think we'll eventually see something like this in the Senate as we see more kind of Trump allies being elected. But at this point, it seems like it's just kind of a tipping point for some of these Republicans who are used to the what we consider traditional Republican Party and are now surrounded by a very different Republican Party. One thing that people often say.

ask about or do punditry about when we're talking about retirements is like, which party is this good for? In a midterm election, we know there's a relationship between net retirements for the Democrats or the Republicans, whichever party's in power, and how they do in the subsequent election. But that's not really the case in presidential elections. It's not a strong predictor. As a reference, some work I did on this

in 2020 showed like every 10 seat advantage that your party has in retirements equates to like 20 more seats in the midterm, but there's no relationship for presidential elections. So I think we've done a good job of considering the other factors, the non-electoral factors that might cause someone to leave Congress. But I would actually be a little more harsh to Congress and the environment

you know, that mainly Republicans have put the whole Congress in by slashing stuff like funding, committee funding, funding for your office, and generally making it a, like, harder place to get stuff done. And I believe that the political science research on why someone would retire points to both

personal factors, like Leah's mentioning, you don't get to spend much time with your family, or maybe you are also foregoing a higher paid career somewhere else, like in lobbying, K Street's not that far from the Capitol. And if you're in Washington anyway, maybe you'd want to make more money.

And then also just like a ceiling on your career effect is something that also gets talked about. So if you've been in the same, you know, in the same committee, you haven't moved around to a higher status committee, then like you're not progressing. And if you view retirements through that lens, like they're just kind of jobs. And at some point people get ready to move on. And if your Congress is not moving a lot of legislation that you want to happen, that you'd be proud of, you're not doing work properly.

that you want to do, that you came to do. That's pretty damning, honestly. I think of Congress and how it's set up basically to fail these days. And of course, you can stack a bunch of polarization and electoral stuff on top of that too. And honestly, not a great work environment. I'd probably want to work somewhere else too.

Elliot, with the human resources take that we can all appreciate, people need to do work that they feel good about, including our representatives. You know what work environment I really like, Galen? This podcast. Love to hear it. Well, we're going to call it a day. Thank you, Nathaniel, Elliot, and Leah. Thanks. Thanks, Galen. Thank you.

My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye-bye.