- [Instructor] Here's a statistic that might surprise you.
95% of elected officials who seek reelection
in the United States get reelected.
Just look at this graph that shows the rate of reelection
for members of the US House of Representatives.
It hovers all the way up here.
It stands to reason that if you have two candidates
for every office, one from each party,
it would be about 50% of the time the candidates
would be reelected, but it's so much more than that.
In this video on Congressional elections,
I want to talk about some of the structural aspects.
That is, the way things are set up in Congressional
elections that leads to this really high number.
What are the advantages of being an incumbent,
that is, the person who already holds a political office?
So what kind of advantages does an incumbent have
simply for already occupying an office?
Well, say maybe there's a Senate race between Candidate
Green, call her Amy Green, and Candidate Rose.
Maybe he's Ken Rose.
Now what sort of advantages Amy Green
just because she already holds the Senate seat?
Well, one of her advantages is that she has a staff,
she has people whose job it is to answer
the phone calls of constituents,
make them feel heard.
They can do all sorts of things to help her.
She also has the advantage of mail.
Members of Congress can send out mail for free,
whereas Candidate Rose over here has to pay for staff
and pay for mail.
Already, that's a lot of money.
The other thing that Candidate Green has going for her
is name recognition.
She's already been a successful candidate, which shows
that she knows how to win an election
and there's a lot of advantage to having name recognition.
It's its own kind of advertising.
Are you going to vote for someone
you've never heard of before or someone
who frequently appears in the media
who could be going to local
or state events, school openings.
You get a lot of face time simply from occupying a seat,
and that's free advertising as well.
The last aspect is money.
Because of this incumbency advantage,
and this is little bit of a repeating cycle,
interest groups, lobbyists, and others are far more likely
to give money to the candidate who is already
in a position because they know
that candidate is likely to win and therefore,
their money is going to get them access
to that candidate who will hear out their concerns
and perhaps look upon them favorably.
So compared to all of this, Candidate Rose
has a really uphill battle.
He's got to pay for a lot of things
that the incumbent doesn't have to,
he doesn't have the name recognition or the automatic
media attention, and he's viewed less favorably
by the people who might give money.
He's a bit of an unknown quantity.
Another advantage that incumbents have
is that they get to draw voting districts
at least every 10 years in response to the US Census
and changes in populations, the districts and states
must be redrawn.
Politicians do that redrawing and they tend to use
this opportunity to create safe districts for themselves,
safe being districts where the voters
who are arranged geographically will be likely
to vote them back into power.
Those in power will also generally use this opportunity
to attempt to harm their opponents
in a process known as gerrymandering.
There are two other major factors that contribute
to whether a Congress member is reelected.
One of them is in each state, the form
that their primary takes.
Some states like Iowa have caucuses where party members
gather to vote on who their nominee should be.
These are very tightly controlled by the party.
There are closed primaries where only
the registered members of a party may vote
on their party's nominees for election,
and then there are open primaries,
where any registered voter can vote for a party nominee,
even if they belong to the opposing party.
So the form estates primary takes as a strong effect
on how tight the party control is over that process.
The last factor affecting Congressional elections
is whether or not they coincide
with a presidential election.
There's much higher voter turnout for presidential
elections since there's a great deal of interest in them
and money spent on them, and that means
that you tend to get a broader sample of the population.
More people are likely to vote, so you'll have a better idea
of how the American voting public is feeling more generally,
but in midterm elections, which are those elections
that don't fall at the same time
as a presidential election, voter turnout is lower,
and that means that it's gonna be the really engaged voters
who are often strongly aligned with a party
that will come out.
Midterm elections also tend to punish the party in power,
so when the president is highly regarded
and doing well, his or her party tends to gain seats,
but if the president is doing poorly or has a low
public opinion rating, then Congressional seats
will often go to the opposite party.
You can see here this chart of net gain and loss
of the president's party, and in most cases,
the president will gain a few followers
in the first midterm election.
See here, George W. Bush, 2002.
His party gained both House and Senate seats,
but often in the sixth year of a two-term presidency,
voters harshly punish the president's party.
You can see that in George W. Bush's sixth year,
the Republicans lost 30 House seats
and six Senate seats, and a similar effect happened
with Barack Obama in 2014.
The Democrats lost 13 House seats and nine Senate seats.
So there's a strong correlation with the president's party
and the fates of members of Congress who belong
to that party.