(RepublicanJournal.org) – A New Hampshire lawmaker has just announced that she won’t be running for re-election this November. Representative Annie Kuster (D-NH), who’s been in Congress for over a decade, doesn’t represent a marginal district — but she’s one of a growing number of legislators who plan to leave Congress at the end of the current term.
On March 27, Kuster, who was elected to represent New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District in 2012 and entered Congress on January 3, 2013, issued a statement confirming that she won’t be running again. In it, she said she plans to keep serving her constituents until the end of her term and, as part of the New Democrat Coalition, will work to pass bipartisan legislation. However, she also admitted that, among other things, her time in the House had been “frustrating” and “challenging.”
Political analysts think Kuster’s district is likely to stay blue after the election, so she probably isn’t stepping down because she thinks she’d lose. It’s possible that, at 67, she’s just had enough. On the other hand, she’s not the only House member to announce that she won’t run again in November. In fact, she’s the 42nd.
Out of the 42 House members who say they won’t run again, 24 are Democrats and 18 are Republicans. The overall number isn’t unusually high — at this point in the 2018 election cycle 44 had announced they’d be stepping down; in 2020 it was 35, and in 2022 it was 42 — but in a House with a knife-edge GOP majority, the party affiliations of those leaving are definitely skewed towards Democrats.
That’s even more noticeable in the Senate. Eight senators have said they won’t run again this year — an independent, two Republicans and five Democrats. This could just be a coincidence, but with President Biden still struggling in the polls it wouldn’t be a surprise if many liberal lawmakers had just had enough.
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