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The 120th Congress is set to feature an unusually large number of new faces.

Ahead of the November elections, at least 83 incumbents across the U.S. House and the Senate won’t be returning to their seats. 

Even now, the 119th Congress already looks different from when it began in January 2025, after a handful of resignations as well as deaths. 

But the expected turnover at the end of the term will be even higher. The reasons vary: some members announced their retirement after decades of service, others have sought different offices. More than usual have lost primaries.

According to Ballotpedia, as of July, the number of lawmakers not seeking reelection is the highest since 2000.

According to a TIME analysis, as of Aug. 13, at least 70 sitting House representatives—30 Democrats and 40 Republicans—are not returning for another term. In the Senate, 13 incumbents also don’t plan to return next year, including one appointed this March, Sen. Alan Armstrong, to replace the seat vacated by now-Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin. These counts do not include the 16 lawmakers who have resigned from or died during the 119th Congress.

With some primaries still underway, not to mention the November general elections in which every House seat and 35 Senate seats are up for a vote, the number of new faces expected in the upcoming Congress will only increase.

Here’s an overview of the lawmakers so far who won’t be returning in the next Congress.

Retirements

In the upper chamber, 10 Senators have announced their retirement. These include Republican stalwarts Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whose recent health issues have raised questions of fitness for office, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, an intraparty critic of President Donald Trump. Sen. Armstrong, who took over the seat vacated by Mullin, has said he will serve only until the end of Mullin’s term, which ends in January. Joining them are Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, and Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. On the Democratic side, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota have also said they will retire.

In the lower chamber, 32 sitting representatives—or almost half of those not seeking reelection—are retiring. Among them is Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D, Calif.). 

Read More: The Colossal, Unexpected Career of Nancy Pelosi

Others who have announced their retirement are Reps. Mark Amodei (R, Nev.), Jodey Arrington (R, Texas), Don Bacon (R, Neb.), Julia Brownley (D, Calif.), Vern Buchanan (R, Fla.), Steve Cohen (D, Tenn.), Danny Davis (D, Ill.), Lloyd Doggett (D, Texas), Neal Dunn (R, Fla.), Chuck Edwards (R, N.C.), Dwight Evans (D, Pa.), Darrell Issa (R, Calif.), Chuy García (D, Ill.), Jared Golden (D, Maine), Sam Graves (R, Mo.), Steny Hoyer (D, Md.), Barry Loudermilk (R, Ga.), Michael McCaul (R, Texas), Morgan Luttrell (R, Texas), Jerry Nadler (D, N.Y.), Troy Nehls (R, Texas), Dan Newhouse (R, Wash.), Burgess Owens (R, Utah), Jan Schakowsky (D, Illinois), Elise Stefanik (R, N.Y.), Marc Veasey (D, Texas), Nydia Velázquez (D, N.Y.), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D, N.J.), Daniel Webster (R, Fla.), Frederica Wilson (D, Fla.), and Ryan Zinke (R, Mont.).

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D, D.C.), a non-voting member of the House, is also set to retire.

Resignations

The 119th Congress also saw several resignations. 

Mike Waltz was reelected for a fourth term as representative of Florida’s 6th district in 2024 but resigned from the 119th Congress days after it opened to join the Trump Administration, first as national security adviser, then as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Mikie Sherrill, who represented New Jersey in the House since 2019, resigned from the chamber in November 2025 after winning the state’s gubernatorial election.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA stalwart who represented Georgia, left office earlier this year amid a dramatic fallout with President Trump, and Mark Green, a Republican who represented Tennessee, left in 2025 in what he said was a “business decision.”

Other resignations were mired in ethics-related scandals: former Reps. Eric Swalwell (D, Calif.) and Tony Gonzales (R, Texas) abruptly left office amid threats of expulsion due to sexual misconduct allegations, while Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D, Fla.) also quit amid questions about her campaign finances.

Deaths

Five House representatives died during the 119th Congress: Rep. Gerry Connolly (D, Va.) at age 75, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D, Ariz.) at 77, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R, Calif.) at 65, Rep. David Scott (D, Ga.) at 80, and Rep. Sylvester Turner (D, Texas) at 70. 

The lone Senator to have died in office this Congress was Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican fixture in the Capitol since 1995 and a Trump critic-turned-ally until his death in July at age 71. 

Seeking other office

Twenty-eight members of Congress—27 representatives and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R, Ala.)—announced that they were giving up their current seats to pursue another office. So far, 13, including five Democrats and eight Republicans, have lost those campaigns for new offices in primaries.

Six Republican House members have secured the Republican nomination for seats in the upper chamber: Andy Barr in Kentucky, Ashley Hinson in Iowa, Barry Moore in Alabama, Mike Collins in Georgia, Julia Letlow in Louisiana, and Kevin Hern in Oklahoma. Other Senate aspirants fell short: Rep. Buddy Carter lost to Collins in the Georgia primary, while Rep. Wesley Hunt (R, Texas) lost the Texas primary to state attorney general Ken Paxton.

Three other GOP representatives—Arizona’s Andy Biggs, Michigan’s John James, Wisconsin’s Tom Tiffany—as well as Tuberville have secured their party’s nominations in their respective gubernatorial races. Reps. David Schweikert (R, Ariz.), Dusty Johnson (R, S.D.), John Rose (R, Tenn.), Nancy Mace (R, S.C.), and Randy Feenstra (R, Iowa) lost their gubernatorial primaries. Rep. Chip Roy (R, Texas) also lost the Republican primary runoff for state attorney general.

On the Democratic side, several House members have lost Senate bids to progressives. In Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary, moderate Rep. Angie Craig was defeated by Peggy Flanagan. And in Michigan’s expensive Senate primary, Rep. Haley Stevens narrowly lost to Abdul El-Sayed. In Illinois, Democratic Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly lost the Senate primary to Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who had the backing of Gov. J.B. Pritzker. In Texas, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who announced her run for Senate after a Republican-led redistricting push placed her residence out of her existing district, ultimately lost in the Democratic primary to state representative James Talarico.

No Democratic lawmakers seeking other office have won their primaries so far, though some departing congressmembers on both sides are still awaiting primaries. On Aug. 18, Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds (R, Fla.) will compete for Florida’s Republican gubernatorial nomination, and Trump-endorsed Rep. Harriet Hageman (R, Wyo.) will seek the Republican nomination for Lummis’s seat. On Aug. 25, Rep. Ralph Norman (R, S.C.), who entered the special election for Graham’s seat after losing the state’s gubernatorial primary, will face Graham’s sister interim-Sen. Darline Graham, who has received Trump’s endorsement. On Sept. 1, moderate Rep. Seth Moulton (D, Mass.) will challenge 80-year-old progressive Sen. Ed Markey in a competitive primary. The final primary contest comes on Sept. 8 in New Hampshire, where Rep. Chris Pappas is favored to win the Democratic nomination for retiring Sen. Shaheen’s seat, potentially setting up a key battleground in the general election.

Reelection primary losses

Twelve incumbents lost their party’s nomination while seeking reelection, an unusually high count with several primaries still to go. House incumbents historically win more than 98% of the time when they seek another term. The 10 House losses so far already exceed the average of 6.5 per cycle since World War II. Seven Democratic incumbents have lost their primaries so far, already tying with 2012 for the most Democratic House incumbent defeats this century.

Democratic primaries have been shaped by a progressive revolt against the party establishment. Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, both endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, respectively defeated incumbent Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat. In Michigan, state representative Donavan McKinney, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, unseated Rep. Shri Thanedar. In Colorado, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros toppled 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette for the party nomination. Democrats are favored to win all four races, according to Cook Political Report.

In a campaign centered more on generational change than ideological difference, 47-year-old former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin beat 78-year-old, 14-term Rep. John Larson to secure the nomination in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District earlier this week.

Other Democratic races took place amid a broader redistricting push. In Texas, new Republican-drawn maps pitted 78-year-old Rep. Al Green against 38-year-old freshman Rep. Christian Menefee, the latter of whom ended up winning their primary runoff for a Houston-area district. Also in Texas, Rep. Julie Johnson, whose 32nd district was redrawn to favor Republicans, ran instead in the 33rd district, where she lost in the primary runoff to former Rep. Colin Allred.

Republican primaries, meanwhile, have appeared largely to be tests of loyalty to Trump. In Texas, Trump-endorsed Paxton beat four-term Sen. John Cornyn in the most expensive Senate primary in history. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R, La.), whose vote to convict Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack became a defining issue in his race, also lost renomination after he failed to advance to the runoff, which was ultimately won by Trump-endorsed Rep. Letlow.

Reps. Thomas Massie (R, Ky.) and Dan Crenshaw (R, Texas) also lost their reelection bids. Massie lost to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein after repeatedly criticizing the President over his foreign policy moves, federal spending, and the Epstein files. Crenshaw, who criticized Trump over the Capitol attack and supported aid to Ukraine, lost to conservative Texas state representative Steve Toth.

In a rare defeat for a Trump-endorsed incumbent, Rep. Andy Ogles (R, Tenn.) lost the Republican primary to Charlie Hatcher, who benefited from a redrawn, more rural district and heavy outside spending from a clean-energy super political action committee.

A couple months after Anthony Gross moved to New York, he came up with an idea for a new TikTok series: He decided to visit and rank different Catholic churches in the city.

“As someone who just moved there from out of state, Midwest, I don’t know anything about New York,” the 23-year-old recalls thinking. “I don’t really have that many friends. I don’t have community. And I definitely don’t know where to go to mass. I would just look it up on ChatGPT. Like I would want to go at night, I’d say, ‘What’s a 5 p.m. mass near me?’”

Some of those videos garnered tens of thousands of likes on TikTok. And, at some of the services he went to, he noticed a lot of other Gen Zers; one Sunday, Gross attended mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village at the recommendation of another content creator, and he recalls that he was “blown away.”

“The place was packed,” he says. “You had to show up 10 minutes early. You could barely get a seat. Everybody was under the age of 30.”

Gross says this is part of a broader religious revival among young people in the U.S.—a sentiment echoed by many people in the Christian community. 

Pastors and priests from across the country have said that they’ve observed more young people attending their services: Bishop John Dolan of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, for instance, says his diocese saw hundreds of people baptized over Easter weekend, most of them Gen Z. Young Christian influencers have also gone viral online. Media outlets have published articles about church being the new Gen Z “hot spot.”

Throngs of young people are turning out for religious conferences and gatherings around the U.S. as well. During the first weekend of August, nearly 2,000 people convened for a three-day Catholic youth conference in Houston, where attendees hailed a resurgence of faith among young people in interviews with the local press. A similar Catholic youth conference will be held in New Orleans for students in grades seven through twelve next month. And in November, thousands of teens will flock to Long Beach, California for the National Catholic Youth Conference—what’s considered to be the largest gathering of Catholic youth in the country. The Passion Conference, a broader non-denominational Christian event designed for 18- to 25-year-olds, is then set to take place—and for the first time ever, the conference will be held in two stadiums, one in Texas in December and another in Georgia in February, which organizers said will “mak[e] room for more students than ever before.” 

But researchers and political scientists have cast doubt on whether those anecdotes are reflective of a widespread trend. In a report released in December, the Pew Research Center said that its polls, as well as other reputable surveys, “show no clear evidence” of a “nationwide religious resurgence” among young people. (The center’s report breaks some of its findings down by “Christianity,” “no religion,” and “other religion.” Many other religion-related surveys don’t break their findings down by different religious traditions; political scientists say that the majority of Americans are Christian, so it can be difficult to draw nationwide trends on other faiths based on the data.) 

In fact, the data shows that young adults are still less religious than their older counterparts. According to data released by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in April, more than 75% of Americans ages 65 and older identify as Christian, compared to 54% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29.

If you look at survey findings, says Ryan Burge, a former pastor who is now a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, there’s no indication of a religious revival among young people. The data does show that religiosity, which refers to the depth of a person’s religious beliefs, has been holding steady since about 2020 after years of decline—but, Burge says, “that’s not a resurgence.”

“I do think that young people are just more open to the idea of religion because they don’t have all this religion background that prior generations did,” he acknowledges. “But at the end of the day, it’s butts in seats. That’s what religion is.”

Burge says the dissonance between the narrative of a religious revival and what the nationwide data is showing could be because “outlier stories are the ones that stick in our minds.”

Another possible explanation he posits for the split between the data and the anecdotes is that the media tends to draw attention to stories that show a reversal of trends. Other experts put forward the same theory.

“One reason we might be seeing the dissonance is that the news media often likes to run stories that run counter to the typical conventional wisdom,” says Melissa Deckman, the chief executive officer of the PRRI. “So I think there might be some legitimate cases where we see an uptick in individual churches where more young people are coming to join or attending services regularly … but I would caution against looking at anecdotes as being the same things as general trends.”

Some experts say that certain pieces of data do suggest that there might be a revival—for instance, Gallup polling released in April found an increase in the number of young men who said that religion is “very important” in their lives. But other metrics, such as regular weekly church attendance, analyzed by other pollsters don’t show this same uptick.

Read More: Religion’s Longstanding Gender Gap Is Narrowing Among Gen Z. But Which Gender Is Narrowing It—and Why?

“I would not say that the evidence [of a revival] has been convincing, but there are hints in the data,” says David Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. “It’s entirely possible that the anecdotal reports are a leading indicator—so one possibility is three years from now, we’ll be having this conversation and say yeah, it turns out there really was a religious revival; it just takes a while to show up in the data.”

“And yet another [possibility] is there really isn’t a religious revival at all,” he continues. “There have always been examples of particular congregations that are able to draw in young people; it’s just nobody had stitched them together into a common narrative until now.”

Deckman also says that the idea of a religious revival “fits into the larger narrative of younger people struggling to find meaning and connection in life,” particularly in this era of the rise of social media and AI, when people are searching for more human connection—which, for some people, religious institutions can provide them with.

Last year, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix began working on an initiative that involved holding listening sessions with young people about their thoughts and feelings on various topics, including faith and family life. What the diocese found, Dolan says, is that young people are wanting—and finding, through the church—“a sense of belonging, a sense of healing from family instability and personal trauma and mental health struggles, [and] a sense of formation.” Young people also said they are searching for “a sense of safety,” Dolan says, adding that the church is “kind of a refuge of reverence and stability; it’s a place where they can step out of this hectic world.”

Rachel Janfaza, a youth political analyst and founder of the research and strategy firm The Up and Up, says that she has also been hearing from many young people that religion is important to them—which “makes sense,” she adds, given the times they’re living in.

“When we look at Gen Z, which has grown up amid constant chaos and really a loneliness epidemic, it makes sense why this cohort would be moving into religion as an organized form of not only community and a sense of belonging, but it also gives them purpose and a way to find meaning in a world that has felt very chaotic,” Janfaza says.

Gross, who recently moved to Fort Lauderdale, says it seems to him that, in New York, “definitely the numbers are up.” His TikToks of St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village show packed pews. Sometimes, he says, people have to stand in the back.

And he attributes that to young people craving community, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I mean, some people may call us the crisis generation; there’s been a lot of stuff that we’ve gone through that has made us feel anxious, uncertain, lost, not loved, lack of community,” Gross says. 

“And in times like that,” he says, people may feel like, “‘I can’t play this game of life alone, and I need somebody else that I can put my trust in, and someone else that I can believe in, and someone else that I know at the end of the day loves me and is going to lead me down a path for a greater good.’”