Politico calls this
a potential “California quake,” and it would certainly be a stunning development. Barbara Boxer has won four terms for the US Senate in California, but would only be 76 years old when she comes up for re-election in 2016. That’s not an age when most Senators retire — they’re usually just hitting their stride. Her partner from the Golden State, Dianne Feinstein, won her first term the same year as Boxer (1992) in a special election to replace Pete Wilson, and won a new term two years ago at age 79. One might expect retirement talk to center on Feinstein, but instead it falls on the junior partner:
Sources close to Boxer, 74, say the outspoken liberal senator will decide over the holidays whether to seek reelection in 2016 and will announce her plans shortly after the new year. Few of her friends believe she will run for a fifth term. Boxer has stopped raising money and is not taking steps to assemble a campaign. With Republicans taking over the Senate, she is about to relinquish her chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
If she were to step aside, it would be the first big crack in the state’s upper political ranks in years. The last time the governorship was open was in 2010, when Jerry Brown, now 76, romped in a return to the job he first held more than three decades earlier. Boxer and California’s other senator, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, 81, were elected in 1992.
Why now? Alex Isenstadt reports that a lot of politicians want their shot at the brass ring:
For a backlog of up-and-coming pols, their opportunity may finally be arriving — and it will be very hard to to pass up.
“There has been a bottleneck at the top,” said Mitchell Schwartz, a Democratic strategist who was Barack Obama’s California campaign director in 2008. “In a state of 37 million-plus [population] … elected officials either need to move up or they are out of the game and forgotten quickly.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/08/boxer-to-retire/
Boxer to retire?
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