Today, Gallup tells me that “U.S. Voters Favor Congressional Newcomers Over Incumbents.” The Washington Post tells me that “Voters’ support for members of Congress is at an all-time low.”
Let’s take a piece of data from Gallup: the percent who says that their U.S. representative does not deserve to be reelected. Gallup has these data from 1992-2010 (pdf). I’ll plot the percentage from the poll closest to the election against the percentage of House incumbents who were reelected in 1992-2008.
There is a relationship between responses to this item and the reelection rate (and it’s statistically significant, in fact). But the relationship is substantively very small. Perhaps the best evidence is the predicted reelection rate I calculated based on the 1992-2008 data, plugging in the most recent Gallup poll, in which a record 40% declared that their member did not deserve reelection. What is the predicted incumbent reelection rate?
87%.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote:
bq. I would be very surprised if any “anti-incumbent fervor” put much dent in the extraordinarily high rates at which incumbents are reelected.
This back-of-the-envelope analysis is why.
