Nobody Trusts Congress, but Americans Keep Reelecting the Same People
The 2024 election is a hotly contested contest, and not just for the presidency: Control of Congress is at stake, too. But for all the money and energy spent on the various House and Senate campaigns, chances are that few seats will change hands. That’s because seats—especially in the U.S. House—have virtually become the property of one party or the other, with very few switching sides. Gerrymandering—the practice of drawing district lines to favor one party or another—has long played a role. But so does Americans’ practice of clustering in like-minded geographical enclaves.
Job Security for Legislators
“In any given election, the vast majority of House districts are won by the party that already holds them,” Pew Research’s Drew DeSilver noted last week. “In 2020, for instance, 93% of districts were retained by the same party; only 18 of 435 districts (4%) flipped.”
With a slim Republican House majority of 220 seats to 212 Democrats and 3 vacancies, that means control really is up for grabs. It also means that only a handful of seats are likely in play to determine who has the majority in the next Congress. The 2020 incumbent reelection rate was no outlier.
Looking at incumbent representatives (not parties) over the decades, OpenSecrets found the reelection rate for House members above 90 percent for the past decade. It hasn’t dropped below 85 percent in at least 60 years.
Pew’s DeSilver went back further—to 1922—and found much of the same. The high-water mark for competitive House races in which any given seat changed hands among political parties at least twice was between 1932 and 1942. During that period “there were 71 mixed-party districts, accounting for 21% of the 342 districts we analyzed.”
In this year’s election, DeSilver believes “only 40 or so of the 435 House seats are competitive.” Those are where control of the House of Representatives will be decided.
By comparison, the Senate has a little more turnover. Well, for the third of it that’s on the ballot in any federal election, that is. In the last 40 years (reelection rates were lower in the ’60s and ’70s), the lowest reelection rate was 75 percent, in 1988. Otherwise, it’s been 80 percent (OK, 79.3 percent in 2000 and 2006) and above since. All incumbents running for reelection won their races in 2022. It was “the first time that no Senate incumbent has lost a general election since 1914,” Jazmine Ulloa wrote for The New York Times.
That’s impressive job security for an institution that draws rock-bottom levels of trust (32 percent, according to Gallup) from the Am
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