538: There Was A Lot Of Turnover In The House In The 2018 Cycle
There are going to be a lot of new faces in the 116th Congress when it kicks off on Jan. 3, 2019. But those new faces also mean that many old faces won’t be returning — 104 members of the House will certainly or probably not be sworn in again next year.
Congressional members leave office for a whole host of reasons. For example, much was made of the numerous Republican retirements announced in the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, but in addition to those who opted to step away from political life, many other members left a seat because they ran for a higher office or because they resigned before their term ended, often after a scandal. In the past, some members have left because they were expelled from office, though that didn’t come into play this year.2 And nearly every Congress, including this one, loses some members who die while serving. So I’ve tried to track turnover in the House from 1974 to 2018 by counting the total number of members who exited the chamber for any reason, including losing a re-election bid, during that two-year term; I then divided that figure by the total number of members who held office during a given cycle to figure out what percentage of all representatives had changed over in that cycle.
Using this methodology, I found 104 members in the 2018 cycle who have already exited or who are on track to exit by the end of this congressional term. This is out of a total of 447 members who will have served at some point in the 115th Congress — some members left and were replaced before the end of the term, which means more than one person sometimes held the same seat. That’s why the total number of Representatives in this and every Congress I looked at is higher than the 435 total seats in the House. As you can see in the table below, the current Congress had the the third-highest turnover rate since at least 1974.
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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/retirements-resignations-and-electoral-losses-the-104-house-members-who-wont-be-back-next-year/
