Government is like an undershirt. If you don't change it frequently, it begins to stink.
The Tea Party movement started in late 2008 as a rejection of President George W. Bush's bailout of the auto industry and Obama's excessive stimulus spending. It evolved into a movement opposed to ObamaCare, and grassroots efforts were employed to find qualified political candidates who could beat incumbents.
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.
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.
The Voting Rights Act is a voter protection act, not a candidate or incumbent protection act.
Challengers do not have a level playing field.
Governments are like underwear. They start smelling pretty bad if you don't change them once in a while.
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.
For too many years, those eligible to vote in primary or general elections did not bother to do so. Those sensible centrists who do not go to rallies but care deeply about our country effectively silenced their own voices. That sent the message to incumbents that they were either doing the right thing or that we just did not care.
Ten of those Republican incumbents, all of whom voted for the impeachment of President Clinton, are from states that Bill Clinton carried.
Incumbents have long promoted regulation in the name of protecting consumers when their actual goal is to block new entrants and stifle competition.
There is no way to create wealth without ideas. Most new ideas are created by newcomers. So anyone who thinks the world is safe for incumbents is dead wrong.
By using the latest sophisticated software, state legislatures can carve out districts that guarantee electoral victory for one party or the other, often in the service of protecting incumbents.
It is easier to disrupt consumer finance. It is much harder to disrupt institutional finance, Wall Street. It is very heavily regulated, and because it is institutional finance, you are dealing with incumbents.
I’m not ready to hand over power to people or groups of people who have no ability to manage a nation.
Incumbents have too much power and challengers have too little opportunity.
Open platforms and experimental amateurs eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros. Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.
Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.
Rules designed to ensure competition ensure that innovators with new ideas can challenge incumbents on a level playing field.
Can old dogs learn new tricks? …. Issue positions among partisans tend to be relatively stable… Party position changes tend to come not from learning new tricks but from electing new dogs.
I think we are incumbent, I am incumbent, the Who is incumbent, anybody that produces anything by me is incumbent by my Englishness.
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.
Whether it's steamships disrupted by the railroads or railroads disrupted by the airlines, it's typically the large entrenched incumbents that are displaced by innovators.
When you have incumbents funded at a rate of 30 to 1 over challengers, it really makes elections meaningless ... a sicko system.
The only way and incumbent can lose a debate is to eat a live rat on stage.
