Why congressional incumbents are re elected at high rates

A look at past election cycles helps explain why. Since , voters have sent their incumbent House representative back to Washington 93 percent of the time. Senators enjoy only slightly less job security — 82 percent. Academics have speculated on the multiple reasons that congressional incumbents have enjoyed an advantage over the years. Incumbents have traditionally used their positions to win favor with voters by offering a variety of constituent services or by pointing to increased funding they've captured for the home state or district.

More recently, some have argued that redistricting has created politically lopsided seats that strongly favor one party over another. Moreover, as the cost of mounting a political campaign has risen, incumbency in Congress has created an important financial advantage in attracting the money needed to win.

Based on the amount of campaign cash both sides have raised so far, Republicans are in a better position to defend their majority in the House than the Democrats are in taking it away. If the Senate's two independents continue to caucus with them, Democrats only need to pick up two seats to win a majority.

Remember, an incumbent is a current officeholder who is seeking to be reelected to that office. Incumbent congressmen have excellent odds of being reelected. This is especially true of Representatives. House of Representatives winning reelection. Reelection rates in the U. Senate are a bit lower, but still impressive. In the past twenty years, the mean reelection rate for Senators is 86 percent. In one recent Gallup survey, as few as 9 percent of people approved of the way Congress was handling its job.

Combined with what we have learned about campaign finance, gerrymandering, and public opinion, the above information about congressional reelection rates raises an interesting set of questions.

The high reelection rate for members of Congress may be due to several advantages that incumbents have over their challengers. You should be familiar with these advantages. Political Action Committees and wealthy individuals have numerous incentives to donate to incumbents.

This has enormous implications for how a challenger might mount a campaign, since campaign commercials are expensive to produce, air time is expensive to purchase, effective websites that provide continually updated information and allow people to donate are expensive to set up and maintain, electoral consultants are expensive to hire, and so on. We call these financially uncompetitive races.

Another important factor is the power of seniority and experience. Almost invariably in campaigns that feature a congressional veteran against an upstart challenger, the incumbent stresses the importance of his seniority and experience in Washington. This is a powerful argument, for it is certainly true that seniority in Congress results in more power, better committee assignments, and greater ability to get bills passed—or greater ability to stop unfavorable bills.

Members of Congress are reelected because their constituents have not been provided with a compelling reason to vote for someone else. True, an under-funded candidate is limited in his or her ability to provide voters with such a reason, but when a member of Congress strays too far from the opinions and values of his or her constituents or becomes embroiled in controversy, challengers will find that they are able to raise more than enough money to make sure the voters know about such things.

In reality, incumbents leave office with fair amount of regularity. Each election year, a handful of House members and Senators retire for a variety of reasons—sometimes because they are not confident they could keep their seat if they ran again. And there are a handful of members that are defeated by challengers each campaign cycle.

In any given election the number may seem small, but some elections produce relatively large numbers of new members. Over the course of three or four elections a large portion of the Congress may turn-over in spite of high incumbent success rates in particular election years. Ultimately, the degree to which the people are effectively represented by their members of Congress must be determined at the individual-level. Note: The content of this web page is republished on the Internet by kind permission of Common Cause , March , and is not a copyright of Citizens for United States Direct Initiatives.

Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Copyright Initiatives v Oligarchy Toggle navigation Menu. See Summary In November of , of the sitting members of the U. Time Sitting members of Congress are on the job full-time—that is what they are paid to do.