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U.S. Voters in Anti-Incumbent Mood
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20193 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
1,784 Words |
| Author
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Ralph Hallow
Ralph Hallow is political reporter and senior national writer
for the Washington Times. |
Pity the candidates, campaign strategists, and ordinary barstool analysts trying to get a handle on the 1992 elections, based on the result of those weird elections last November. Voters in Washington State, who had earlier said they were hot for term limits, turned around on Election Day and nixed such limits for congressional and other state officials, 56 percent to 44. And despite a much touted, throw the bums out mood abroad in the land, in Pennsylvania an incumbent U.S. senator trounced a well-known and respected challenger. As comedian Milton Berle used to say, "What the hey?"
The seeming contradictions were a cynic's delight and a pollster's nightmare. Does anyone remember those Associated Press poll taken just days before the election, which found Americans favoring limits on congressional and state legislative terms 66 percent to 17? Nearly three-quarters also said they wanted to limit their own representatives' terms in Congress to 12 years. The year before, initiatives limiting the terms of state, though not federal, lawmakers had sailed through legislatures in Oklahoma and Colorado and, by a narrower margin, in California.
Driving the term-limitation movement was the documentably ugly public mood toward Congress. A national survey by Public Opinion Strategies just weeks before the election showed 64 percent of respondents disapproving of Congress and only 16 percent of approving. This was especially ominous for congressional incumbents, given that a far smaller proportion of the electorate disapproved of Congress throughout most of the 1980s when even during the Jim Wright and Tony Coelho scandals, the electorate's congressional approve-disapproval percentage were tied at 37-37.
Understandably, therefore, the folks most likely to be nervously eyeing last November's election were members of Congress who already had made federal legislating a full-time, permanent career, and freshmen lawmakers who had their hearts set on doing so.
These incumbent congressmen and senators from states other than Washington expected the worst. But, in a curious, convoluted way, they got the best news possible, under the circumstances. The good news was not that the term-limit went down to stunning defeat. Nothing that simple.
You could argue, for example, that the Washington initiative was a special case, because it was more severe and punitive than anything that had preceded it in other states or that was
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