I'd like to start off this diary by sharing a map with all of you.
The map shows the percentage difference in Democratic representation going into the 2010 elections and after the 2010 elections.
Overall, Democratic representation in the 45 states holding elections on Tuesday dropped from 55% to 45%. If you factor out New Hampshire and it's 400 member House, the average percentage of Democrats in the chambers of 44 states dropped from 55.3% to 46.8%. On the House side, 2591 Democrats were members of the lower chamber going into the election and 2171 will be members after the election. On the Senate side, the numbers drop from 913 to 791.
Essentially this means that the battle to win back the United States House and many state legislative chambers will be one that younger Democrats must wage.
If you look into the Democratic House Leadership in the 111th Congress, you will find that all 3 leaders (Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn) are 70 or older. To put this in context, the 3 House leaders working closest to the President are over 20 years older than him. Not to dismiss the quality of the working relationship, but one would have to imagine that both sides grew up in different worlds and can see things from different angles.
But the question of which young Democrats are going to step up was made a lot harder by the losses inflicted on Democrats on November 2nd.
47 of Democratic Members of the 111th Congress were born in 1961 or afterwards. Which comprised 18% of all Democratic House Members. Republicans had 39 House members born in 1961 or after out of their 178 member caucus, which is 22%.
After 11/2/2010?
10 of the 47 lost re-election bids (Nye, Perriello, Patrick Murphy, Scott Murphy, Stephanie Herseth, Boccieri, Kratovil, Driehaus, Schauer, and Zack Space). Patrick Kennedy retired. Kendrick Meek lost a bid for the Senate. Artur Davis lost a bid for Governor. Dan Maffei, Rick Larsen, and Melissa Bean are in undecided races. The NINE member Democratic Freshman Caucus includes 3 members under 50: David Cicilline (48), Cedric Richmond (37), and Terri Sewell (45) [all of them replace another member of Congress who was under 50 years old]. Which means that the 112th Congress will feature (at the most, if Larsen/Maffei/Bean win) 37 Democrats who are 50 or younger in the Democratic Caucus.
The Democrats born before World War 2 who will not be part of the 112th Congress include Ike Skelton, Jim Oberstar, Paul Kanjorski, Solomon Ortiz (probably), David Obey, Bill Delahunt, and Bob Etheridge (in all likelyhood). The only seat held by the Democrats of those was Delahunt's seat. The rest provide realistic pickup opportunities for Democrats (except for whatever happens to Missouri's 4th after Missouri loses a district in redistricting).
Another interesting thing about the map I posted to start this diary is the impact that local races had in holding down the state legislative losses. The two states where Democrats gained ground were California (lots of safe districts and Jerry Brown defeating eMeg Whitman) and Delaware (Christine O'Donnell v. Chris Coons). Amongst states where losses were under 3%, there were two states where we can hardly do worse (Georgia, whose Gubernatorial race turned into a decisive Deal win, and South Carolina, which had a close Gubernatorial race), along with West Virginia (Having Joe Manchin on the ballot and winning by 10 probably held off a bigger loss there), Maryland (strong Dem incumbent for Governor), Hawaii (nonexistent local GOP, strong Abercrombie win), and Vermont (competitive Governors race, weak GOP).
But amongst districts with a huge amount of Democratic losses, Minnesota stands out the most because it had a competitive Gubernatorial race, yet Democrats went from decisive majorities to clear minorities in a huge upset. Thanks to redistricting, Minnesota will elect their House and Senate again in 2012, allowing them an opportunity to shake out the truely lousy freshman Republicans and replace them with Democrats.
New Hampshire... is probably weirdly prone to giant swings due to the multi-member districts. But going from 216 seats to 102 seats is just a pretty decisive beating. Anyways, serving in the New Hampshire General Court is one office where the membership is a bit unorthodox due to the wage paid to legislators.
Alabama and Arkansas didn't have a competitive race on the top of their ballot, and the Republicanization of Arkansas, started in 2008, continued in 2010, as it would not shock me if the Arkansas Democratic Majority was saved in 2010 by the Arkansas Republicans not fielding enough candidates. North Carolina is a kind of weird one which can be explained further by someone in that state.
But what really hurts the bench for Democrats is the significant losses in Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Such losses probably temporarily limit the number of good legislators who could be seen as future candidates for Congress.
I don't have a great conclusion paragraph, so here's a list of the 112th Congress Democrats who are 50 or under.
Jared Polis, Andre Carson, Chris Murphy, Tim Ryan, Dan Boren (technically), Ben Lujan, Martin Heinrich, Heath Shuler (QB), Gabrielle Giffords (ok, I don't think this is called, but it looks good right now), Linda Sanchez, Jason Altmire (backup QB), Jim Himes, Kathy Castor, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Dan Lipinski, Jesse Jackson Jr, Adam Smith, Tim Walz, Anthony Weiner, Yvette Clarke, Jim Langevin, Keith Ellison, Betty Sutton, Ron Kind, Laura Richardson, John Sarbanes, Joseph Crowley, Mark Critz, Tammy Baldwin, Mike Ross, Ted Deutch, David Cicilline, Terri Sewell, and Cedric Richmond. (Larsen should win, Bean is probably lost, and I don't know about Maffei)
You would think that one of these days, some of the young organizers who got to really shake things up two years ago on the Presidential campaign are gonna emerge as candidates for some Congressional district.