I was listening to election results on the radio recently and a phrase caught my attention. The commentator said that the Iowa caucus in the first week of 2012 was the beginning of the 2012 election cycle. I hadn’t thought about it before but the phrase “election cycle” is accurate in one sense but is false and misleading in another sense.
Every 2, 4 and 6 years there is an election in the US. The presidential election is on a 4-year cycle. A Representative in the US House of Representatives must stand for re-election every 2 years. And a Senator in the US Senate must stand for re-election every 6 years, but every two years one-third of the 100 Senators is involved in an election cycle. So, yes, there are election cycles.
But let’s look at the elections in a different way.
A Congressperson is up for an election every so often on a regular basis, hence the the name election cycle. But most of those Congress people, Representatives and Senators alike, are re-elected again and again and end up serving in the US Congress much longer than just one term in office. Here is are statistics about re-elections from the Internet
In November of 2004, 401 of the 435 sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives sought reelection. Of those 401, all but five were reelected. In other words, incumbents seeking reelection to the House had a better than 99% success rate. In the U.S. Senate, only one incumbent seeking reelection was defeated. Twenty-five of twenty-six (96%) were reelected.
My point is that what is actually happening before our eyes is so obvious that we, the electorate, don’t see it: that is, when we talk about the actual election process — putting people into elective office — we should refer to it as the “election re-cycle.” We are fooling ourselves to think otherwise. Incumbents have advantages over challengers: “perks in office, exposure via the media, campaign staff.” And they are in a position to gather much larger war chests for re-campaigning than are their challengers. Money is a major reason that a person elected to the US Congress tends to stay in Congress.
So, let’s refer to the congressional elections process as an election re-cycle. That way the American public will know what it is doing when it votes. They are unthinkingly tethered voting for the incumbent. Not a very democratic process in my view.
Comments
3 responses to “Insight into the American Election Re-Cycle”
Yet in Presidential politics, incumbency is a mixed bag:
2008: No incumbent.
2004: Incumbent barely won.
2000: No incumbent (VP incumbent lost).
1996: Incumbent won.
1992: Incumbent lost.
1988: No incumbent (VP incumbent won).
1984: incumbent won.
1980: Incumbent lost.
1976: Incumbent lost.
1972: Incumbent won.
1968: Incumbent withdrew.
1964: Incumbent won.
1960: No incumbent (VP incumbent lost).
1956: Incumbent won.
1952: Incumbent withdrew.
1948: Incumbent won (easily, but seen as a major upset).
1944, 1940, 1936: The same incumbent won.
1932: Incumbent lost.
Part of the mixture is due to incumbency limits. Part of it is people often seeking a change at the top. But there are many factors at play. What does the recycling scene look like at the gubernatorial level?
HI ilan, i would think that the elections in the USA at the level of state governor is more like that for the presidency. governors in many states also have term limits and they harbor the ambition to move up the political food chain to congress or even the presidency. winning a congressional seat provides a lifetime of benefits and perks unavailable to the general public that elected them. how can so many politicians with average salaries go to congress and in a matter of years become millionaires with great health care coverage that they vote to deny the public? Political satirist Bill Maher said something interesting for US politics: “I can understand why the 1% [the super rich} vote Republican but i cannot understand why the other 49% of the American public does.” Americans often and in large number tend to vote against their own interests!! mickey
i just received an interesting article floating around the Internet with Warren Buffett’s suggestions on how to fix the deficit by fixing US Congress. here is a quote from his interview on CNBC in mid 2011 as reported in the Wall Street Journal:
“There’s a good chance your email inbox or Facebook news feed has recently been spammed with a chain letter that contains a novel idea attributed to Berkshire Hathaway billionaire Warren Buffett to eliminate the deficit.
To wit: Make a Constitutional amendment that would make all members of Congress ineligible for re-election if the deficit exceeds 3% of gross domestic product. That way, the argument goes, congressmen would have a strong incentive to make compromises and balance the budget.
Part of the quote is real. In July, he told CNBC’s Becky Quick:
BUFFETT: I can— I can— I can end the deficit in five minutes.
QUICK: How?
BUFFETT: You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Yeah. Yeah. Now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right?”
the whole article includes the chain letter that has gone viral. The chain letter also lists other perks that allegedly Buffett would deny US Congresspeople. <http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2011/10/28/the-warren-buffett-chain-letter/>