Political Incumbency Quotes

No Reelection

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.

There is only one thing I want to say about Ohio that has a political tinge, and that is that I think a mistake has been made of recent years in Ohio in failing to continue as our representatives the same people term after term. I do not need to tell a Washington audience, among whom there are certainly some who have been interested in legislation, that length of service in the House and in the Senate is what gives influence.

My sense was that most of the elected officials in Washington - in their heart of hearts - really believe that the system can't be too bad because it produced them. And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power. We've seen it time after time after time.

I think that many citizens understand how our system works, or rather, fails to work, for structural reasons. But who has the capacity and the incentives to bring change? The banks and other corporations love the system because it allows them to buy legislation that serves their own interests even at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. Incumbent politicians love the system because it allows them to raise millions of dollars toward defending their seats.

The politicians already in office don't want to change. A few might have it in their hearts to change and to start working for the people, but even some of the most progressive politicians are silent because they know that the candidate with the most money wins.

When you have an incumbent President, reality trumps argument.

… despite widespread popular unhappiness with the direction of national politics and a Congress with the lowest approval ratings on record, the highly partisan and deeply polarized American electorate opted collectively for the political status quo in 2012.

Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.

And then for the first time in history a Cook County state's attorney was reelected for a third time.

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.

No [electoral] challenge to an incumbent President is ever a “walk in the park,”

Well, just that there would be somebody in the office and the voters - it was more or less an understanding in the entire community, as long as that person was doing a good job on the merits, nobody was going to run against him.

It is a common happening that those in power, as their tenure of office continues, find themselves less and less able to contemplate relinquishing it.

State legislators are becoming more like congressmen in that incumbents nearly always win.

The reapportionment of 2002 designed congressional districts that favored incumbents of both parties, leaving virtually no room for challengers to be elected. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, only four incumbents lost to nonincumbents of the other party. In all, 96 percent of incumbents were re-elected. (It was only 90 percent in 1992 and 1982 after the previous reapportionments.)

I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have.

The incumbents just have a ton more money because they have rigged the system to help themselves, because they have these networks of small donors. Meanwhile, the amount of people, the incumbents being reelected has just been - that has been going up and up and up.

Congress is full of people who get reelected and reelected. How can you have urgency when there are all of those safe seats?

Florida is very difficult to have name ID... That's why statewide incumbents usually get reelected in Florida.

The congressional leadership is never in a hurry to go home and campaign. They all have safe seats.

I guess I was a little idealistic and thought if you are honest and you're well-qualified and capable of waging a good fight, you can raise money. And what I learned is that our campaign finance laws are really a great big incumbent protection act.

The power of incumbency and the power of money is just overwhelming.

It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity, and incumbency.

Around the nation, lawmakers have drawn up their districts with such perverse precision and aversion to competition, that legislators rarely face competitive challenges.