A few weeks ago, I was dubious about 2012 as an “anti-incumbent” election. Alan Abramowitz brings some better data to bear:
The graph shows that when congressional incumbents lose, they tend to be mostly from one party. There are really no elections in which large numbers of incumbents from both parties are defeated.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I did some research related to this question for my bachelor’s thesis. I looked at the probability of re-election for marginal first-time incumbents in state legislatures using a regression discontinuity design. I found huge swings in the incumbency advantage by party at the state level, effects that fit well with the prevailing political narrative at the time.
The graph is on page 43 and can be found here:
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1672&context=etd_hon_theses
Get rid of the dots and set the x and y axes at 0, and ya got yerself a graph.
2 of the top 3 years for R losses are followed in 2 years by big losses for D’s. ’74 is the height of W’gate, so no reason to think that the D’s could blow that in 2 years, and I guess the same could be said about W’s second term. Anti-incumbency toward R’s seems to be followed 2 years later by anti-incumbency toward D’s (except when the R’s screw up as bad as Nixon and Bush II, then it takes 4 to 6 years for the D’s to blow it (this seems to prove that Nixon was worse than Bush II.))