Republicans are sounding the alarm over a series of crushing losses in recent elections.
“While it is tempting for many in our party to wish away these results, the pattern is clear that there is at least a current 10-point Democratic over-performance from Trump 2024 — and it’s built on a fired-up Democratic base and a sleepy GOP base,” one unnamed GOP operative told Axios.
Democrats are outperforming former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 results by double digits in multiple state-level races, according to the report.
In 20 state legislative special elections this year, Democrats averaged 10.5 points ahead of Harris’ performance, while last year, in 67 state House and Senate races, they outpaced her by nearly 14 points, according to The Downballot.
One in 10 lawmakers will leave Congress at the end of the year, the most retirements in more than three decades.
To date, 61 members of Congress – 52 from the House and nine from the Senate – have announced plans to retire at the end of the term or are leaving to run for another office.
The number could still go up in the coming months, but it is already the most retirements since the 1990s and the second-largest in roughly a century, according to data compiled by the Brookings Institution that dates back to 1930.
The top year for congressional retirements was 1992, when 65 House members and seven senators left or ran for another office. Those 72 voluntary departures — many more lost reelection campaigns that year — were due to a variety of factors, including redistricting changes, lawmakers caught up in a House check-bouncing scandal and a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment.