Incumbistanis

clipped from thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com From memory I had dredged up that this was a modern symptom due solely to the changes of the 'Progressive' era.  Thus I dredged through my posts and found the lovely graph of the problem, itself: My initial feeling was that it had been a long time since there was even a 30% turnover in Congress, and I was right.  The last times that happened in the post-'Progressive' era were: 1904, 1912-1916, 1922, 1934.  As the top graph's red line is percentage, the startling artifact is that all Congresses prior to 1902 had never REACHED a 70% return rate.  That era of 1896 to 1902 was the one-way 'ratchet' to modern Incumbistani politics, in which America went from 'throwing the bums out' on a continual basis to 'throwing the bums back in' on a continual basis.  That percentage shift is as clear as night and day where the left half never reaches up to 70% turnover and the right half rarely reaches below 70%.