A poll conducted earlier this month found that 68 percent of American voters want to replace the entire Congress. Do they? In 2024, less than three percent of incumbents lost their bids for re-election.
While Americans claim to hate Congress, they also seem in love with their own congressman. Over the last decade, members of the US House and Senate won re-election more than 90 percent of the time.
The worst two years to be an incumbent federal lawmaker were in 2022 and 2018. In both years, 39 lost re-election. Out of 435 members of the House and 100 members of the Senate, that was just 7.29 percent forced from office by their voters.
Oh, I know, you’ll say that those percentages are unfair because only a third of the Senate is up for election in any given year. Okay, so of the 435 members of the House and 33 members of the Senate up for elections… 91.7 percent were re-elected.
Incumbents do lose, of course. We saw that this year here in Texas. For example, Republicans ousted John Cornyn and Dan Crenshaw, while Democrats sent Al Green and Julie Johnson packing.
But it is so rare as to be newsworthy. If voters TRULY want to replace Congress, we need to do a better job of replacing our congressmen.
I’m not one to place bets, and I certainly don’t try to predict the future, but it is unlikely the entire Congress will be replaced. After all, 21 members of the House are unopposed. And something like 81 percent of the 435 House seats are “safe” from being flipped by the opposing party by legislative design.
So if an incumbent hasn’t lost in their primary, they are unlikely to lose in the general. It is not impossible, just not likely.
The disconnect is not hard to see. We all get that our republic suffers from the sort of malaise generated by ill-serving incumbents who seem incapable of saying no to any spending scheme that is decorated in their party’s colors … or that of the opposing party. We don’t have a multi-trillion-dollar debt because there is an overabundance of fiscal restraint.
But not because our federal lawmakers are necessarily spendthrifts, but because we are. Americans carry more than $1 trillion in credit card debt, so why are we surprised that our servants behave with “our” money the way we each do ourselves?
The problem is not the reckless spending we do ourselves, or the reckless spending our congressman does “for our district” or “for our state.” It is, we say with the deepest sincerity imaginable, the reckless spending that other people elsewhere are getting their lawmakers to do.
Rinse and repeat for every policy.
It is easy to think that simply replacing Congress, as apparently 68 percent of our neighbors do, will fix the problem. The uncomfortable truth is this: Congress does represent us. Congress is a mirror held up to the nation. It might be a funhouse mirror, distorted in places. But it is a mirror, nonetheless.
It is up to us to save the republic from the politicians and from our own bad thinking.
If we are to bring sanity to Congress, we must first exhibit sanity ourselves. As a self-governing republic, it is up to us, the citizens, to inspire better thinking among our friends and neighbors. Our founding fathers did it 250 years ago. We can do it today.
We just have to get to work.
