As the GOP-led Congress struggles, members give up their seats at a historic pace

Last summer, The Washington Post looked ahead to the 2026 midterm elections and took note of the “slow congressional retirement season.” Roughly seven months later, there’s a good reason observations like these have entirely evaporated.

Late last week, Republican Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, joined a long and growing list of congressional incumbents who have announced they won’t seek re-election in the fall.

The larger pattern is striking. The New York Times reported:

The number of Republicans departing the House this cycle is one of the highest since 1930, according to Brookings Vital Statistics on Congress. This cycle’s Republican departures are surpassed only by 2018, the midterm election year during President Trump’s first term when his party was also bracing for big losses. (The G.O.P. lost 40 House seats, and the majority, that year.)

Such a high rate of turnover in the majority party typically reflects incumbents preferring to leave Congress than risk serving in the minority. More than 30 Democrats departed the House during the 2022 midterm election cycle, in which Republicans won the majority.

It’s worth emphasizing that nailing down the precise number of congressional retirement announcements is a little tricky because of the details: Some members have said they’re ending their political career, while others are giving up their seat to pursue other office. Some members have already resigned in the middle of their term, while other members have died during their current term.

In some instances, we’ve even seen incumbent lawmakers step down in order to serve in the Trump administration.

But pulling all of the data together, what we see is an electoral landscape in which 61 U.S. House members — 22 Democrats and 39 Republicans — are giving up their seats. That number, one of the highest in the past century, might very well grow in the coming days and weeks, either voluntarily or as a result of possible primary defeats.

As for the Senate, the upper chamber is seeing plenty of turnover, too. Nine incumbents (four Democrats and five Republicans) are retiring; two other GOP senators are running for governor; and two more Democratic senators — Colorado’s Michael Bennet and Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar — are also running for governor, though they’re technically not retiring because their terms are not yet up. (If they succeed, they’ll be positioned to name their own successors.)

But just as important as the raw totals is the factor driving the announcements: Capitol Hill just isn’t a great place to work lately.

Congress, at an institutional level, has become increasingly paralyzed and dysfunctional, a problem made worse by the fact that Republican leaders have surrendered many of their powers to the White House. Between this and GOP officials’ fears of a voter backlash in November, there’s no great mystery as to why the chambers are poised to see a dramatic personnel shift.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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