I’ve been recounting the lessons I learned from (unsuccessfully) running for Congress. The first lesson was that politics is a time warp. With a few exceptions, it is dominated by people who started running for office, or started their preparation for running for office, decades ago—and this explains why our political system can be so slow to react to quickly changing events.
I came across a figure that confirms part of this: a calculation that in this year’s primaries (as of late June), the number of congressional incumbents who were running for office and won their primaries dropped dramatically: from 98.2% to, er, 97.1%. That article notes that an unusually large number of incumbents decided not to run for re-election this year. (This is mostly on the Republican side—people who aren’t sufficiently aligned with Trump, or people who realize he’s going to drag them down to defeat in the general election.) But the point still stands. In my case, I didn’t know if my main opponent’s one term in Congress sixteen years ago would confer most of the advantages of incumbency, and yep, it did.
The second big lesson I learned is that this applies to the voters, too—and especially a party’s core voters, the ones who tend to decide the primaries and determine what alternatives you see on your ballot in November. The composition of these voters also tends to reflect the reasons people got involved in politics decades ago, whether they’re local organizers and activists or just the politically engaged rank-and-file—rather than their response to recent events.
The Laws of Ideologial Inertia
This was driven home to me pretty early on when I met a very nice local Democratic Party organizer in Nelson County (between Charlottesville and Lynchburg) who is a Navy veteran, who has worked on veterans’ issues for years, and who will grill you on those issues at every available opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes; every issue needs its single-minded advocates or it will be forgotten in favor of something else. But this set a pattern, and the problem is that the priorities created by these prior political commitments can be a little too unyielding to the requirements of current events.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
