House Retirements and Targeted Districts

While a substantial number of members of the House of Representatives are retiring, don’t expect these retirements to produce many flipped seats or shifts in the ideological makeup of either party.

As of January 13, 47 members of the House have announced their retirement, 21 Democrats and 26 Republicans. (I’m not counting resignations by Majorie Taylor Greene and Mikie Sherrill whose seats will be filled with special elections this year.)

The retirement rate has been running a bit ahead of recent cycles as of this date, which were 42, 34, 41, and 40 from 2018 to 2024. Still, I don’t think we are seeing extraordinarily high levels of retirements, as some commentary suggests. In the end those previous four cycles produced totals of 52, 36, 49 and 45 retirements, suggesting we may end up in the mid-to-upper 50s this year. Past retirements are from Ballotpedia.org.

The main point I want to make here is that the retirements are spread pretty widely throughout both Republican and Democratic caucuses by ideology and 2024 vote margin. The solid dots are retiring members. These are not endangered incumbents who barely scraped by in 2024, nor are they ideological outliers relative to their caucuses.

The figure shows all House members by vote margin and by left-right ideology, using Nokken-Poole dimension 1 ideology scores from VoteView.com. These scores are based on roll call votes by the members. Nokken-Poole is a variant of the widely used Nominate scores. Nokken-Poole scores range from -0.848 for the most liberal member to 0.986 for the most conservative member. Vote margin is the percentage for the Republican candidate minus the percentage for the Democrat, so negative margins are Democratic wins and positive ones are Republican victories.

Among Republicans, the median 2024 vote margin is 28.2 percentage points, and the median for retiring Republicans is 26.1 points. On ideology, the median Nokken-Poole score is 0.542 (higher scores are more conservative.) Among retiring Republicans the median is 0.581

Democratic retirees have somewhat larger vote margins, -36.8 percentage points, than their caucus as a whole, -27.0 points. On ideology, the retiring Democrats are also more liberal, -0.461, than the full Democratic caucus, -0.394. These are modest differences, however, and the figure makes clear retirements are well scattered throughout both caucuses.

The upshot of this distribution of retirements is that it does not open up many opportunities for turnover as most retirees enjoyed reasonably secure margins in 2024. Nor are retirements likely to significantly shift the ideological balance in the House given that retirees are ideologically pretty representative of their caucuses. While open races are less predictable than incumbent ones, the strong partisan lean of most of these districts means we should expect no more than a handful of these seats to potentially flip.

DCCC and NRCC target districts

Both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committe (DCCC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) have released lists of districts being targeted as pick up opportunities. Compare this figure with the retirements above. The targeted districts are, as you would expect, far more concentrated in races that were narrowly decided in 2024. (These lists were released by the NRCC on March 17, and by the DCCC on April 8. They do not include changes or additions after some states redistricted in 2025. These are the members’ districts in the 119th congress.)

Republicans on the DCCC list have a median vote margin of 6.8 percentage points, much closer than the caucus median of 28.2 points. They are also less conservative, 0.384, than the full caucus, 0.542.

Democrats on the NRCC list also had much closer 2024 races, with a median of -3.2 percentage points compared to -27.0 for the full caucus. These Democrats are also less liberal than the caucus, with a median Nokken-Poole score of -0.221 compared to the caucus median of -0.394.

If you are looking for change in the House, look at the districts each of the parties are focusing on. They have a much greater chance of flipping than the seats of retiring members, and would be more likely to remove relatively moderate members of either party. The latter fact will also contribute to polarization in the House. Rather than target ideologically extreme members of the opposition party, both Democats and Republicans target close races, which also happen to be where the most relatively moderate members are.

Continue ReadingHouse Retirements and Targeted Districts

Attention to news in 2025

What we noticed and what we ignored

Time for a look back at the news of 2025 and what the public paid attention to and what it largely ignored. The year has not lacked for news, especially political news as Donald Trump expanded his authority through executive orders, followed by litigation over those orders.

My Marquette Law School Poll asks how much people have heard or read about recent events in the news in each poll:

Here are some recent topics in the news. How much have you heard or read about each of these?

Polls are conducted every other month, six times a year. This is not a comprehensive review of news events but provides a look at how much attention the public gave to a wide variety of mostly political news. Topics are picked from recent events that have received significant coverage and raise important political issues, with more emphasis on news stories published within a few weeks of each poll’s field dates.

Figure 1 shows the 32 topics asked about over the year.

The top topic of the year, by a substantial margin, is tariffs. The May survey came a month after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of tariffs on April 2 and the subsequent changes made in rates and implementation dates. Fully 81% of U.S. adults said they had heard or read a lot about the tariffs.

The second most attention went to Trump’s plans for deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, with 70% hearing a lot about this in the first month of the administration. Subsequent items concerning immigration issues varied in visibility, with the mistaken deportation of a man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador in March ranking as the 7th most followed event, with 63% hearing a lot. When Garcia was returned to the U.S. in June, only 37% heard a lot about that, ranking 25th of 32 news items.

Cuts to the federal workforce ranked 3rd most followed story, with 67% hearing a lot as of May. Rounding out the top five news items were the war between Israel and Iran in June and the contentious meeting between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on February 28th in the Oval Office. U.S. airstrikes on nuclear facilities in Iran ranked 6th.

At the bottom of the chart are Trump’s attempts to remove a member of the Federal Reserve Board and the firing of the director of the Centers for Disease Control, followed closely by 30% and 29% respectively.

If you follow politics enough to be reading this post you will probably to shocked that attention to the November elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia ranks 31st of 32 events, with only 28% hearing a lot about this. For us political junkies, it is a reminder that much of the public doesn’t follow politics closely, and especially not elections in states other than their own.

The honor of being the least followed of the 32 stories is Trump’s extended diplomatic trip to Asia in late October, during the shutdown of the federal government, with only 24% who paid a lot of attention to that trip.

Attention to news by party

Figure 2 shows attention to these news topics by party. A higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans say they have read or heard a lot about most of the news events covered during 2025. By comparison to either party, independents are considerably less likely to have followed news across every item.

Highly visible events receive more attention across all partisan lines while more obscure events are also followed less by each party group. The correlation of attention for Democrats and Republicans is .78. Independent attention correlates with Democratic attention at .91, and with Republican attention at .85. In short, news tends to penetrate each partisan group in similar ways though with generally lower attention from Republicans and especially independents.

Republican vs Democratic attention to news

Figure 3 shows the attention gap between Republicans and Democrats across the 32 topics, arranged by size of the difference between Republican and Democratic attention. For the news items we asked about, Democrats say they have heard or read more than do Republicans for 24 items, Republicans more for 5 items and the parties are tied for 3 items.

It is notable that the items with greater attention from Republicans are closely tied to Trump. Attention to his inaugural address shows the largest Republican advantage over Democrats in attention, 27-percentage points, followed by Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress (don’t call it a State of the Union address) with an 11-point GOP lead in attention. Other topics with a Republican advantage closely concern Trump–the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas and the U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

At the opposite end of the partisan attention gap, Democrats paid much more attention to the “No Kings” protests in October, by 23-points, and to a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the winter by 20-points. Democrats also paid substantially more attention than Republicans to the firing of the CDC director and reductions in the federal workforce.

Perhaps surprisingly, Democrats paid considerably more attention in September to the potential release of the Jeffrey Epstein files than did Republicans, by 16-points. (This does not cover the actual release of the files in December, after our final poll of 2025 in November.) Coverage of this issue has emphasized pressure from Republicans and MAGA activists for the release, though Democrats also supported the law to require the files to be made public.

This invites the question of whether Democrats simply pay more attention to politics than do Republicans.

In fact, attention to politics is virtually identical for Republicans and Democrats, while independents are much less attentive in general. We ask

Some people seem to follow what’s going on in politics most of the time, whether there’s an election going on or not. Others aren’t that interested. How often do you follow what’s going on in politics…?

Forty-nine percent of Democrats say they follow politics most of the time, as do 48% of Republicans, a trivial difference. In contrast, only 26% of independents say they follow politics most of the time. The lower attention from independents is reflected in their notably lower levels of attention to news events, but this can’t account for Republican and Democratic differences across news items. Table 1 shows attention to politics by partisanship in 2025 surveys.

One plausible explanation is that partisans follow different news sources, and those sources give different emphasis to specific news events. I don’t have data on the actual content of various news sources, but in my data there are only small (typically 3-4 point differences) in awareness of news events between Republicans who follow only conservative news sources and those who follow a mix of conservative and liberal sources, and a similarly small difference for Democrats who follow only liberal sources versus a mix of liberal and conservative sources. This casts some doubt on the idea that it is differences in content that drives differential awareness, and suggests that partisanship has more to do with what news people pay attention to, and remember. More on this in a future post.

The data tables

For those who want to see the numbers in detail here you go. Table 2 shows those who heard or read a lot, a little and nothing at all for each news event. While there is some variation, the most prominent news items have high “heard a lot” and low “nothing at all”, and the less prominent items reverse this.

Table 3 shows high attention to news by party identification.

Continue ReadingAttention to news in 2025

Family financial situation in Wisconsin

The cost of living, or “affordability”, is at the top of public concerns likely to shape the 2026 elections. Let’s look back over the last decade for some perspective.

For the past 10 years the Marquette Law School Poll has asked Wisconsin registered voters about their family’s financial situation:

Thinking about your family’s financial situation, would you say you are living comfortably, just getting by, or struggling to make ends meet?

The percentage saying they were living comfortably rose steadily during the first Trump administration, from around 50% in 2016 to over 60% by 2020. But as inflation rose in 2021 the trend reversed, falling to 44% near the end of the Biden administration in late 2024. In the first year of the second Trump term the percentage living comfortably has turned up modestly, standing at 50% as of October.

Those who say they are just getting by reverse the pattern for those living comfortably, declining from 2016-20, rising from 2021-24, with a slight downturn in 2025. Those struggling also move in rough parallel with those just getting by.

The decline in financial well-being during the Biden administration goes a long way to explaining Biden’s low approval rating during the last three years of his administration and Trump’s ability to win Wisconsin in 2024 by 0.9 percentage points, after having lost the state by 0.6 points in 2020.

The upturn in financial situation in 2025 contrasts with continued worries about inflation and the cost of living, which was the most cited problem in the October Marquette poll, at 27%, with an additional 9% citing the economy as most important. These concerns are substantial across the usual partisan lines: 23% of Republicans rank inflation as most important, as do 27% of independents and 32% of Democrats. Only Republicans rank another issue higher, immigration, at 31%.

What lies behind the changing sense of financial security or insecurity over the past decade? Partisanship plays a big role, as does income.

Family finances by party identification

The upturn in sense of living comfortably in 2025 is entirely due to Republicans who turned sharply more positive with the change of administration in January. By the end of the Biden administration only about 34% of Republicans said they were living comfortably, but by October this had soared to 63%.

In contrast, independents living comfortably declined throughout the Biden administration and show no upturn in 2025. Democrats viewed their financial situation as stable through the Biden years with a substantial downturn in 2025.

There is no evidence these changes in perceived financial situation reflect real fluctuations in income. In 2024, 37% of Republicans reported family incomes over $100,000, and 37% had that income in 2025. For independents, 28% had this level of income in both 2024 and 2025. Slightly more Democrats had incomes over $100,000 in 2025, 34%, than the 32% in 2024.

Family finances by income

This powerful effect of partisanship does not mean money doesn’t matter. Those living comfortably rises with income while those struggling goes down as income rises. More important is the changing sense of well-being over time and especially during the Biden years. Across each income level the percentage living comfortably fell during Biden’s term after rising during Trump’s first term. Those struggling declined or was flat during Trump’s first term but rose under Biden, especially for lower income families, though also for those of middle-income. For the high income group a decline in living comfortably translated into a rise in the feeling of just getting by. In 2025 all income groups show at least a small increase in sense of living comfortably and a downturn in those saying they are struggling.

Family finances by party ID by income

We can disentangle the income and partisan effects a bit by looking at both simultaneously. Republicans, regardless of income, showed declining financial well-being throughout Biden’s term and have shown an improved outlook in 2025. (The data here are aggregated by year to provide enough cases to reliably estimate both partisan and income effects simultaneously.)

Both low- and high-income independents had declining finances in 2021-24 and continued down in 2025. Middle-income independents seem a bit better off in 2024 and 2025 than earlier in Biden’s term.

Low- and high-income Democrats held stable in their sense of family finances under Biden, with both dropping off a bit in 2025 under Trump. This contrasts with middle-income Democrats who felt increasingly worse off under Biden and are continuing down under Trump.

Not to be missed in all these details is that among Republicans and independents every income group felt their financial situation was better during Trump’s first term than during Biden’s. Democrats were more stable during the Biden years, with the important exception of middle-income Democrats who felt increasingly worse off.

Finances, party and the vote

The sage said, “it’s the economy, stupid” and this seems to hold up today as it did in the 1990s. If not the only thing that matters, these shifts in financial security from 2021-24 surely go a long way to pointing us to crucial groups who found themselves feeling worse off in 2024 than in 2020. This was especially true for middle-income people who reported being less secure regardless of party by 2024. For Republicans this reinforced their partisan inclinations while for Democrats greater insecurity is associated with a modest increase in votes for Trump, and likely reduced turnout: among Democrats living comfortably, 96% said they were certain to vote in 2024, while among those struggling 86% said the same. Turnout increased slightly for struggling Republicans vs comfortable ones, while turnout was lower for struggling independents than those living comfortably.

Voting for Trump was higher in 2024 for those struggling compared to the comfortable across parties, with modest differences among Republicans and Democrats but a large 40-point increase for Trump among struggling independents vs. comfortable ones.

The lesson for 2026 and beyond: “it’s the economy, stupid”.

Continue ReadingFamily financial situation in Wisconsin
Older Posts