Poor Mike Johanns.
The Nebraska senator gave his farewell address yesterday, after one six-year term. Unlike most senators bidding farewell this month, Johanns is a Republican, of course. Here’s the sad part for Johanns: His party takes over the Senate next month, but Johanns’ entire tenure in the Senate will have been served in the minority.
This is a very rare thing, mostly because Senate control has flipped seven times since 1980, with the longest uninterrupted majorities since the 1970s being 8 years. It’s much more common for a senator to spend his entire tenure in the majority than the minority, because of math, basically: Elections that usher in a new majority tend to usher in more new members of the new majority than the other.
So Johanns is rare in two ways: He was a freshman Republican in 2008, a year when Democrats had more takeovers and won more open seats; and he’s a Republican departing in 2014, when only Democrats lost re-election, and mostly Democrats retired.
As far as I can tell, you have to go very far back to find the last senator to serve a full term and to never spend a day in the majority. By my reckoning, the last one was Dewey Bartlett, an Oklahoma Republican. Bartlett was elected in 1972. Come 1978, Bartlett was facing a very tough re-election against Gov. David Boren. Bartlett fell ill, and retired at the end of his term. Two months later, he died. The following election, Republicans took control of the Senate.
Of course, before that, Democrats controlled the Senate for two decades, and so plenty of Republicans served multiple terms without a day in the majority. But nobody did it after Bartlett — until Johanns.
Johanns and Bartlett: Two breadbasket-region Republican governors elected to the Senate, retiring after one term, and never serving a day in the majority.
