So far, seven months into 2019, eight Republican representatives have announced retirement, six of them during the months of July and August 2019. By comparison, in 2018, 39 congressional Republicans (three U.S. senators and 23 members of the House of Representatives), together with 18 Democrats, did not run for re-election. What is going on with all these Republican retirements? One narrative has it that Republicans were retiring because they were fed up with the toxic political environment or were afraid of losing elections, but these narratives were prematurely formed or they lacked correlation. There actually are three possible hypotheses...