Salon is starting a new feature called The Numerologist which is going to feature political scientists writing about politics using analysis that involves at least some reference to numbers or figures; I believe most posts will involve a figure or a graph. They asked me to write the first one – I think John is up on Wednesday – which featured the graph above. It was accompanied by short a blog post reiterating the point made by the chart that – at least for now – there are actually more Republicans than Democrats currently vacating seats in both the House and the Senate, a situation that was definitively not the case in 1994. Now this doesn’t mean that the Democrats won’t get hammered anyway due to the state of the economy or that Republicans aren’t retiring from safer seats than Democrats, but it is worth keeping the basic numbers in mind, something that seems to get lost in the media’s response every time another Democrat announces a retirement. For more, see the post at Salon.
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Thanks for adding some real data to this conversation. Seems like the media has over-chomped on the history-is-repeating itself meme.
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