Not Anti-Incumbent but Anti-Democrat

Timothy P. Carney writes at Beltway Confidential about the mood in the country:

My 11th grade American History teacher was a good teacher and a total liberal. The day after the 1994 elections, she mumbled something about “anti-incumbent fever.” I went home and checked the newspaper, and confirmed that every single Republican senator and House member seeking reelection had won that day. The only Republican incumbent to lose in 1994 was liberal Republican David Levy who lost his primary to conservative Daniel Frisa.

We’ve got the same canard these days. The press is talking about an “anti-incumbent” year. You see this descriptor in the L.A. Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Agence France Presse, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and many more.

But are any Republican congressmen trailing in the polls? In the House, it’s only Anh Cao in New Orleans and Charles Djou in Hawaii, both of whom won seats they had no business winning. In the Senate, Richard Burr of North Carolina is the only Republican incumbent who is even vaguely in trouble right now.

And what sort of incumbent Republicans lost their primaries? Bennett and Murkowski — two moderates enmeshed in the GOP establishment. On the D side, Arlen Specter lost and Blanche Lincoln almost did. David Vitter, who has been caught up with prostitutes, is the only conservative Republican who was really threatened.

So, “anti-incumbent” is the wrong word. This year is generally anti-Democrat, anti-establishment, and anti-middle-of-the-road.

As I recall from 1994 not a single GOP governor incumbent lost that year either. It was GOP night in America

This year I think Vitter's gonna win and I think there's a better than average chance that Cao and Djou will too, especially if this is the wave election that it's shaping up to be.

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia has been making the case for some time that this is not an anti-incumbent year because such a high percentage of incumbents have been renominated by their parties. He's correct, but come November a bunch of those incumbents won't be returning to Congress and pretty much all of them will have (D) after their names.

It's not an anti-incumbent year, but an anti-Democrat year.