Incumbent Advantage Quotes

Properly done gerrymandering will increase the weight of some votes and nullify the effect of others, in order to ensure with near certainty that elections will yield the outcome desired by the incumbents.

I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat would defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972.

I believe in term limits. I believe the country would be hugely better off if we had more turnover in Congress.

Freedom rests on a rational distrust of government; government will always use its power to benefit the incumbent administration.

I think the whole dynamic is different. Whereas in [Barack] Obama's case, even though there was no incumbent, he was able to run against eight years of Bush-Cheney and a Republican Congress, and everyone was tired of everything. He was able to benefit from that.

Re-election campaigns of sitting presidents are always about the sitting president.

In fact, corporate and union moneys go overwhelmingly to incumbents, so limiting that money, as Congress did in the campaign finance law, may be the single most self-denying thing that Congress has ever done.

When politicians seek to restrict political speech, it is invariably to protect their own incumbency and avoid having to defend their policies in the marketplace of ideas.

The Voting Rights Act is a voter protection act, not a candidate or incumbent protection act.

Inside the institution (Congress) there's a sense of puzzlement that incumbents have a lock.... The members feel they are targeted of a conspiracy, using slick ad techniques and misinformation, to remove them from office, no matter how hard they have worked.

You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent... because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.

A lot of people feel left out by a government that taxes too much and regulates them too heavily and seems to result in a set of circumstances where economic and political incumbents benefit at everybody else's expense.

For all the manufactured 'Republican versus Democrat' drama that dominates today's cable news and political rhetoric, the most striking feature of our present-day democracy is not partisan divide - it's a corrupt system that protects incumbents from the consequences that real democracy brings.

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.

It is very difficult for any dictator or any incumbent to falsify the results of an election and just get away with it.

Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.

If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a President fresh from a war victory.

Incumbents have too much power and challengers have too little opportunity.

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

The reason the U.S. lags so badly is that we have obsolete rules that favor big over small, supply over efficiency, and incumbents over new market entrants.

For many years, we have had these campaign finance reforms, and they have been failures. Money is more coursing through our system than ever before. Incumbents have used the laws to advantage themselves. And one of the reasons I think they have been failures is we have tried to crush down the money in places like the political parties, and it has squished out into opaque super PACs and sort of hidden channels.

If Ralph Nader runs, President Bush is going to be re-elected, and if Ralph Nader doesn't run, President Bush is going to be re-elected. We're going to run on the president's strong and principled leadership and his positive agenda for a second term.

When you have incumbents funded at a rate of 30 to 1 over challengers, it really makes elections meaningless ... a sicko system.

When you have an incumbent President, reality trumps argument.

Redistricting makes the inequities in campaign financing even worse. Most elections are so noncompetitive due to how the lines are drawn that big donors already know who's going to win. So they give to the likely winners to curry favor.