eglamkowski's Journal: The winners of the 2006 elections: the incumbents

As always. So much for a democrat revolution :-p

House Results:
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/house/full.list/index.html
358 incumbents win a contested race
22 incumbents win an uncontested contest
23 incumbents lose
32 set up for grabs

403 races involving incumbents, in which 23 incumbents lost.
That's a 5.6% turnover rate. Hardly a revolution. If you went to Las Vegas and knew you had a 94.4% chance of winning every game you played, you'd bet huge every time. It's a no-brainer.

Over in the Senate it's a moderately bigger quake:
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/senate/full.list/
23 incumbents win
6 incumbent loses
4 seat up for grabs

6 out of 29 incumbents lost, for 20.6% turnover rate amongst incumbents. Much closer to being a revolution, but not really there - 79.4% odds of winning at Las Vegas would still be worth betting big every time.

That's the problem we have - everybody likes to complain about politicians, but when it comes time to put their money where their mouth is, oh, well, it's everybody else's politicians that are the problem - their's is just fine!

And so very little ever changes. The incumbents know they are relatively safe, the vast majority of turnover occurs only when someone retires or is otherwise forced out.

*yawn*

There will be no revolutions

[Ethelred Unraed]

...at least not in Congress any time soon. Gerrymandering has pretty much made the vast majority of seats utterly uncontestable.

It's revealing that the turnover in the Senate (which can't be gerrymandered, of course) was so much higher.

It's pretty sad that voters in California shot down Arnie's proposal for an Iowa-like districting system -- California, for better or worse, tends to lead the way on a lot of things, so that could have set a trend. Now it won't happen for some time yet, if ever. *sigh*

C

Money, meet mouth

[mwlewis]

My congressman is a moron. [house.gov]

Indeed.

[Shadow Wrought]

Of course you want to make sure that you vote so that the wrong lizard doesn't get elected.

Nail meet head...er...Hammer meet foot...

[iminplaya]

Well, something like that. And to make matters worse, although an incumbent individual might get kicked out, the incumbent party (there can be only one) remains. So, in effect incumbency is more like 99%, at least. I'm afraid this invalidates your sig. It's not government that's the problem. It is we who so willingly hand over our authority over to them. In many things, the government is told, "We don't care how you do it. Just do it. We don't want to be bothered with the details. We want our cheap gas!", a