Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, an Arizona Democrat elected in 2018 after two previous stints in the House, won’t seek another term.
Kirkpatrick, 70, told the Arizona Republic she’ll bow out of Congress ahead of the Grand Canyon State’s House districts getting redrawn, based on the 2020 census.
“I’ve been in public service for 18 years, and I’ve always been a proponent of term limits,” Kirkpatrick said. “I’m sort of term-limiting myself.”
Kirkpatrick, on Jan. 15, 2020, announced she was taking a leave of absence in the House for treatment of alcoholism after being injured in a fall. She returned to Congress on Feb. 26, 2020, shortly before COVID-19 swept over the United States and much of the world.
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Kirkpatrick represents a Tucson-based district where President Biden in 2020 beat former President Donald Trump 55%-44%.
On Friday, the House Republicans’ campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee, made clear that it plans to win the seat Kirkpatrick is vacating.
“Ann Kirkpatrick saw the writing on the wall: Democrats’ House majority is doomed,” NRCC spokeswoman Torunn Sinclair said. “We look forward to turning this seat red again because Arizonans deserve a congresswoman who represents them, not Nancy Pelosi and Democrats’ socialist agenda.”
Kirkpatrick’s political fortunes have largely mirrored those of House Democrats over the past 12 years and the rise in strength of Arizona Democrats in the traditionally Republican state.
After a single, two-year term as a state representative, Kirkpatrick in 2008 won a sprawling House district in northeast Arizona that is the 11th largest in the country, out of 435. But after the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, she lost to GOP Rep. Paul Gosar, as House Republicans picked up 63 seats and reclaimed the House majority they’d lost four years earlier.
After redistricting ahead of the 2012 elections, Gosar ran and won in a more conservative House district along the California state line. Kirkpatrick came back to reclaim her old seat as Obama won a second term in the White House.
Kirkpatrick, in 2016, ran for the Senate against the late Republican Sen. John McCain but lost handily. The next election cycle, she moved south to Tucson, and in 2018, as Democrats won their first House majority in eight years, she reclaimed her place in Congress.
Throughout Kirkpatrick’s dozen years in and out of Congress, Arizona has turned ever more competitive. In 2020, Biden became only the second Democratic presidential nominee to win its electoral votes since 1948. Arizona now has two Democratic senators for the first time since January 1953. And its House delegation has five Democratic members to four Republicans.
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For the 2022 elections and into the next decade, though, redistricting is in the hands of an independent state commission to redraw lines. Kirkpatrick’s district could stay a relatively Democratic stronghold or be made more competitive.
Kirkpatrick also is among a small number of House members who have served three different stints in Congress. Others include Carol Shea-Porter, a House member from New Hampshire three times between 2007-2019, Ron Paul, a Texas Republican and three-time presidential candidate, and William H. Harrison, a Wyoming Republican in the House during the 1950s and 60s, and a grandson of President Benjamin Harrison, and great-great-grandson of President William Henry Harrison.
