Throw The Bums Out?

Interesting column today from Stuart Rothenberg. He says that hopes for an anti-incumbent wave in the Congressional elections may not work out. He analyzes past elections to prove that point.

Of those, the worst year for incumbents was in 1992, when a total of 24 House incumbents — 16 Democrats and eight Republicans — lost to challengers. Cole, who served as NRCC executive director back then, has cited the '92 elections as an example of a year when voters directed their anger at incumbents of both parties (and ousted a sitting president).

Twenty-four House incumbents going down to defeat may well qualify as an anti- incumbent election in the abstract, but, alas, it's more complicated than that. The devil is in the details.

Large numbers of incumbents lost that year because of scandals and redistricting, not because voters across the country were so angry with Capitol Hill or with politicians in general that they simply voted against incumbents, regardless of party. The 1992 CQ Almanac did a wonderful job documenting this in its end-of-the-year rehashing of the election results.

"Voter discontent and redistricting did take a toll on members who sought re-election, but the much-discussed possibility of an Election Day cyclone of anti-incumbent sentiment failed to materialize Nov. 3," the almanac's authors wrote.

Some incumbents lost because their districts had been redrawn to include more opposition partisans who voted primarily because of party. Others lost because they bounced checks on the House bank or were under indictment. Some lost because of the top of the ticket. Few, if any, lost merely because they were incumbent officeholders.

So classifying1992 as an "anti-incumbent" election is committing a classic mistake: focusing only on the aggregate numbers and ignoring the individual results.

All of that may well be true. But as Rothenberg himself pointed out just last week, the Democrats pulled a truly dumb stunt with their Armenian genocide bill, a move that could damage them badly at the polls.

The problem for the Democrats is that the controversy over Congress' steps to assert that Turkey was guilty of a policy of genocide isn't a laughing matter — at least it isn't to the Turks. Instead, it is the first truly dumb thing that Democrats may have done since the party won both chambers of Congress last year.

If the Democrats continue to pull stunts like that one and a candidate for President has extremely high negative poll numbers that will not budge, a scenario presents itself where coattails could make all the difference. The problem with reasoning by historical analogy is that sometimes the history that counts hasn't been written yet.