Ah, I figured it wasn’t voluntarily since he ran for reelection.
Did he or anyone think there was a chance at winning the House in 1980?
That they needed about 60 seats to flip made it unlikely (they came up 27 seats short, 191R to 244D). Of course, had the country voted then as they do now with the House/Senate seats generally going the same as the Presidential vote, they’d have won, what, over 350 seats ?
The big problem was that the GOP was still a weak minority party, in many areas it couldn’t or wouldn’t compete with substantive candidates, and even if it did, the candidates didn’t have the financial or GOTV resources to make them competitive (Dem gerrymandering was also a problem, as we would see, especially in California).
A proposal made in the early ‘70s was to try to form an alliance between the GOP and disgruntled Conservative Democrats to try to elect a Speaker to wrestle leadership away from the Democrat left, but that came to naught and the Dems stuck with their party. Neither Rhodes or Michel would’ve been nimble enough to entice 30 Boll Weevils to their side, since it would’ve been all those apostate Dems putting their necks on the line with no guarantees from the GOP to protect them (and with a weak GOP in many areas they hailed from, it would be difficult to do).