“Salon”:http://www.salon.com is starting a new feature called _The Numerologist_ which is going to feature political scientists writing about politics using analysis that involves at least some reference to numbers or figures; I believe most posts will involve a figure or a graph. They asked me to write the first one – I think John is up on Wednesday – which featured the graph above. It was accompanied by short a blog post reiterating the point made by the chart that – at least for now – there are actually more Republicans than Democrats currently vacating seats in both the House and the Senate, a situation that was definitively _not_ the case in 1994. Now this doesn’t mean that the “Democrats won’t get hammered”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/02/the_democrats_are_gonna_get_ha.html anyway due to the “state of the economy”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/02/the_economy_structures_everyth.html or that Republicans aren’t retiring from “safer seats than Democrats”:http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/the-line/house-retirements-pile-up.html?wprss=thefix, but it is worth keeping the basic numbers in mind, something that seems to get lost in the media’s response every time another Democrat announces a retirement. For more, see “the post at Salon”:http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/21/congressional_retirement_chart/index.html.