Incumbency Advantage Quotes

It has become a cliché that voters no longer choose their legislators. The legislators choose their voters.

… because … gerrymandering makes the districts less competitive, candidates are freed to pander to their bases while ignoring moderate and independent voters. More ever, politicians who do not pander face primary challenges from ideologically purer candidates.

We must return conservatives to the majority in the U.S. Senate.

It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity, and incumbency." —George W. Bush, June 14, 2001, speaking to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Perrson, unaware that a live television camera was still rolling.

This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies?

The fundamental goal of Republicans and Democrats is to get themselves re-elected.

It is the rare - maybe even nonexistent - politician who will admit this, but number one on the politicians to-do list is always to get reelected. Nothing else comes close. The economy, the stock market, the war on terrorism ... NOTHING comes ahead of getting reelected. Staying in power is job number one.

As was demonstrated back in 2012, [Barack] Obama was thought to be in big trouble after that first debate, and he wasn't, was he? That first debate didn't end up hurting Barack Obama at all, did it? I know he had incumbancy on his side, but still. He was horrible that first debate. It didn't matter because there were two more, and there are two more here.

If a member of Congress doesn’t pay attention to process of reapportionment as the result of the census, he ends up being called “former Congressman.”

In a new democracy, the most important election is the second election.

The power of incumbency cannot be underestimated.

Incumbency adds a layer of advantage on top of this party dominance. But rather than foster an environment in which members of Congress feel free to buck popular sentiment and wrestle seriously with the problems confronting the country, it reinforces the ideological divide between the parties.

The joke about SAP has always been, it's making '50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like, it's really - yeah, the incumbency - they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.

Most of the people who are in elective office in Washington, D.C., they have held public office before. How's that workin' for you?

Nowhere else in the democratic world has another parliamentary incumbency stood for so long or become so nearly beyond prospects for change.

Americans hate Congress but can't help ourselves from re-electing its members over and over again.

When you have an incumbent President, reality trumps argument.

We all live in the moment, and we often mistakenly believe that what is true today was true always. Not so in politics, and especially in Congressional elections.

All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.

Everyone knows that a federal job is a lifetime job, and for many in Congress, it seems they have a lifetime job, too.

The only way a challenger can compete with the built-in advantages of incumbency is to spend money.

I can see both sides of term limits, and I think, in different positions, term limits make more sense than in some others.

In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.

We favor a constitutional provision limiting the office of President and Vice-President to one term, and providing for the election of Senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people.

India's national elections are really an aggregate of thirty different state elections, each influenced by its own local considerations, regional political currents, and different patterns of political incumbency.