Turnover in Congress not so bad, after all

Perhaps all the talk in Washington about prominent members of Congress quitting due to hyper-partisanship – and many others fearing a primary challenge if they don’t please the true-believers in their party’s base – is, well, off base.

Over at The Washington Post’s “The Fix,” they crunched the numbers and found that even as a significant number of seats have changed partisan hands, overall turnover in Congress (due to retirements, deaths and primary losses) has actually been rather unremarkable, from a historical perspective.

Even the amount of new blood after the 2006 and 2008 elections, in which Democrats picked up a combined 54 House seats, ranked low historically, according to the author of the piece, Aaron Blake.

The charts below, from the Congressional Research Service, tell the story of turnover in the House and the Senate:

Blake’s conclusion: “The fact is that members used to retire and lose primaries a lot more than they do today. For the vast majority of members, merely running for reelection at all assures that they will return for the next Congress. So why not stick around?

“Which means that the Congresses of today include about the same amount of new blood as they used to — even as people claim to hate everything about the institution.”