What Mike Gallagher's Retirement Tells Us About the House GOP

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI)

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) is not the kind of House incumbent you expect to retire, short of a scandal.  Gallagher is young, telegenic, and a war hero, serving in Iraq before he was elected to Congress in 2016.  Since then, he has moved up fast, chairing a subcommittee on China, serving on the Armed Forces committee, and was seen by many (including me) as an eventual statewide candidate or potential figure in a future House GOP leadership.  That is, until he announced yesterday that he would retire at the end of this term from Congress.  Gallagher cited in his retirement announcement "Congress is no place to grow old" as his excuse for not wanting to pursue another term, but given Gallagher, at 39, is 20 years younger than the median age of a member of Congress, this feels a little specious, and worth investigating.

Gallagher's retirement comes after a busy congressional year, including actively being pursued to run for the US Senate against Tammy Baldwin (given he was considering icing DC all-together, it's no longer a surprise that he turned this opportunity down).  It also comes just days after Gallagher was one of three House Republicans to vote against the spurious impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, citing it as a dangerous precedent that the House should enact, simply impeaching a cabinet secretary on policy was not a bridge the GOP should cross (for the record, he was right).  This resulted in ire toward him from members of his own party.  On top of that, Gallagher's congressional seat will potentially be redrawn later this year to include a lot of new territory, as the Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering a redraw of the state's congressional delegation given it's heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans (it's likely that Gallagher, thanks to his Mayorkas vote, might've gotten an inter-party primary from a colleague if the new maps go through).

This explains Gallagher, but it doesn't explain the exodus we've seen from House Republicans in the past few months (and, it's worth noting, it's only February-House retirements, unlike Senate retirements, tend to come later in the year & we could still have a few left).  Currently, there are 24 Democrats retiring and 21 House Republicans retiring.  Retirements are generally seen as a predictor of what will happen in November, but that's not always the case.  In 2020, Republicans actually gained seats (though not the majority), even with twice as many retirements, and in 2014 (while Republicans were crushing Democrats to win an even larger majority in President Obama's last term), there were considerably more GOP retirements than Democrats.  But what it does tend to do is say which party is unhappy in Washington (and as a result, which ones have less confidence about November).

Because if you look below the surface, of the 24 Democrats retiring from the House, 12 of them aren't actually retiring from public office.  Nine are running for the Senate (Ruben Gallego, Barbara Lee, Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, Lisa Blunt Rochester, Dave Trone, Elissa Slotkin, Andy Kim, & Colin Allred), while Jeff Jackson, Dean Phillips, & Abigail Spanbarger are pursuing other higher offices.  The Republicans are not-only seven of them are running for higher office, meaning that there's actually more House Republicans leaving public life than Democrats (at least those that want to leave public life-obviously not all of the Democrats or Republicans are actually going to win these higher offices).

It gets worse when you look below-the-hood a little bit further.  The average age of a Democrat retiring from congress is 67, while with Republicans it's 62, a relatively pronounced age difference when you remember that three of the Democrats are retiring less of their own accord and more because of factors outside-their-control.  Wiley Nickel & Kathy Manning were both gerrymandered into unwinnable districts, while Jennifer Wexton is dying of progressive supranuclear palsy.  All three have indicated were it not for these factors, they'd be on the ballot in November.  Subtract these three from the metric, and not only are there only seven true Democratic retirements this fall, but you also have an average retirement age for the Democrats of 71...almost a decade more than the Republicans.

It's not just backbenchers in the House that are retiring.  Republicans like Gallagher, Patrick McHenry, & Cathy McMorris Rodgers have been called the future superstars of their caucus, and the latter two both have had positions in House leadership.  They also include Rep. Greg Pence, whose brother was running for president just a few months ago, and by virtue of his last name, is one of the more recognizable members of the GOP.  These are the future of the party...in theory.  That they're retiring increasingly indicates to me that many of them, the "establishment" figures who govern as hardline conservatives, but are more in the Mitch McConnell wing of the party than of the Marjorie Taylor Greene wing, don't see a future for themselves.  That might not indicate that the Republicans are going to lose in November (though it doesn't exactly recommend itself, particularly as it looks likely that the Democrats will net their first seat via special election this Congress on Tuesday).  But what it does tell me is that the people billed as the most talented figures in the Republican Party no longer want to be a part of its future in a world where Trump can dictate policy (and they have to bow to the whims of people like Greene).  After all, most of these House Republicans are going to run in the mold of Trump/Greene in order to win these open seats, making the House GOP of 2025 even more extreme.