America loves incumbents!

When I agree with Kathy on a matter of substance, that matter almost always deserves a post. Rightly, I think Kathy challenges the conventional wisdom that yesterday’s primaries demonstrated the power of anti-incumbent passion. Example: the NY Times headline about Joe Sestak’s win read Specter Defeat Signals a Wave Against Incumbents. Nate Silver writes,

Joe Sestak is a mainline, lunchpail Democrat who defeated a very unpopular Republican-turned-Democrat who ran an awful campaign and who Pennsylvania Democrats weren’t used to punching their ticket for. No huge shock there.

The anti-incumbency narrative tend to rely on flattening out the particularities of a given election, e.g. treating Specter simply as an incumbent, not a Republican facing his first Democratic primary. Similarly, Silver points out how coverage of the GOP primary in Kentucky has assumed that Rand Paul is an anti-establishment crusader, yet he wasn’t running against an actual incumbent:

For all his libertarian and tea-party dressing, Paul in fact ran on a fairly conventional, conservative platform…This was actually very clever, in a lot of ways — Paul’s last name (and decision to affiliate himself with the tea party) gained him national attention and fundraising and earned media, but to people in Kentucky, he ought to have been a very comfortable choice who was somewhat more fresh-faced than his rival. The branded product beat the generic one.

Now over to Arkansas, where challenger Bill Halter forced Sen. Blanche Lincoln to a run-off:

Halter endeared himself to national progressives and to unions with his vocal support of the public option, giving him money, momentum and media attention. But to Arkansasans, he was a relatively familiar face (as the sitting Lieutenant Governor).

Let me be clear. I would agree that anti-incumbent sentiments are more influential this year than most. (Then again, “Vote for the incumbent!” has never been a popular slogan.)

My point is that the simple “anti-incumbent” narrative ignores the peculiarities of specific races and collapses the critical distinctions between at least three very different kinds of anti-incumbent animus. First, there is the anti-Obama/Pelosi/Reid movement that has galvanized the Republican base. Second, there is the anti-incumbent sentiment of less partisan voters who want someone to blame for high unemployment. Third, there are some Democratic voters who want to replace moderates with tougher fighters.

These three tendencies may reinforce each other or may clash head on. Their significance may change in response to external conditions, such as the state of the economy. You’ll miss those complexities if you reduce all three to the simple notion of anti-incumbency.