Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords will retire next year — so now the question becomes whether Democrats or Republicans can snatch his seat.
Is he retiring because he feel he can’t win? Or because of GOP ire due to the crisis he sparked four years ago when he dumped the GOP? Not really. It certainly sounds like it’s for medical reasons:
Jeffords will make the announcement Wednesday afternoon in Burlington, three sources close to the senator told The Associated Press on Wednesday. They spoke on condition of anonymity.
No calls to Jeffords’ press secretary or staff were returned Wednesday morning.
Jeffords, 70, has been adamant in saying he will seek re-election, but there have been increasing concerns voiced about his health in recent weeks. Jeffords has suffered from a bad back and neck for years and has seemed confused in several news interviews by some of the questions.
Sources say Jeffords will also cite the ill health of his wife Liz as a factor. She has been battling cancer.
Jeffords was elected as a Republican to the U.S. House in 1974 and to the U.S. Senate in 1988, but he abandoned the party in 2001 because of disagreements with the Bush administration.
So what happens next? The Democratic Daily Kos blog:”It’s Vermont. Dems will be the prohibitive favorites. But it’s always a pain to defend an open seat.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.