That speech was also the launchpad for a new chapter in his Senate career. Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson ended up winning the Democratic Party nomination, but losing the general election to Eisenhower. After Jimmy Carter’s first term in the White House, he got a challenge in the form of Massachusetts U.S. ... Kelly, the incumbent, lost to liberal challenger Jill Karofsky by a wide margin. In 1952, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver challenged President Harry S. Truman for the Democratic Party nomination. An anti-incumbency factor can also be responsible for bringing down incumbents who have been in office for many successive terms despite performance indicators, simply because the voters ar… Who knows because despite people’s growing dissatisfaction with the economy, Obama still has a healthy approval rating so only time will tell. This phenomenon is said to bring an advantage of up to 10% for first term representatives, which increases the incumbency advantage. The Northern Democrats had spearheaded the addition of a civil rights plank to the party platform at the 1948 convention, leading the Southern Democrats to form a spin-off “Dixiecrat” coalition. incumbent definition: 1. officially having the named position: 2. to be necessary for someone: 3. the person who has or…. However, the trend is headed in the opposite direction. “Parties were still big tents and had factions and wings, and now parties are so polarized and monolithic,” says Perry. “People thought that it was close for an incumbent president and [Johnson] looked vulnerable because of the Vietnam War,” says Perry. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Dog Thieves Capitalize on Pandemic Pet Demand, Could Trump Lose the Republican Nomination? The timing of this e⁄ect is consistent with the hypothesis that legal constraints on gerrymandering, such as the Voting Rights Act, have become tighter over time. In 2014, Florida 2 Rep Steve Sutherland (R) lost the House elections to a Democrat- … Before primary elections became the dominant way to pick a nominee, party leaders were more able to either shut down challengers or smoothly pass the nomination to someone else. Learn more. In some situations, there may not be an incumbent at time of an election for that office or position (for example, when a new electoral division is created), in which case the office or position is regarded as vacant or open. That summer, TIME reported that 55% of Americans believed it was wrong for Gerald Ford to pardon Nixon, and that polls showed Republicans rated Ronald Reagan higher than Ford in leadership and decisiveness. The 1976 campaign season was the year in which primaries started to matter more than ever before, and is considered the closest a sitting President has come to losing his party’s nomination in modern history. "Re-election" redirects here. Only two Republican incumbents lost their seats in 2010 — both in strongly Democratic House districts. Subscribe for just $18. It is also argued that the holders of extensively powerful offices are subject to immense pressure which leaves them politically impotent and unable to command enough public confidence for re-election; such is the case, for example, with the Presidency of France. The result was the opposite on Election Day votes, with Caruso besting Petrolia by more than 500 votes. As a result of this race, both the Democratic and Republican parties made rules changes in the early 1970s that created today’s modern primary-centric nomination process. [7] Voters who experience the negative economic shock of a loss of income are less likely to vote for an incumbent candidate than those who have not experienced such a shock. Subscribe for just $18. An anti-incumbency factor can also be responsible for bringing down incumbents who have been in office for many successive terms despite performance indicators, simply because the voters are convinced by the challengers of a need for change. Popularly known as the anti-incumbency factor, situations of this kind occur when the incumbent has proven himself not worthy of office during his tenure and the challengers demonstrate this to the voters. “[Truman’s] defeat by Kefauver in the New Hampshire preference primary emphasized that he was not the unanimous choice of Northern Democrats,” TIME reported in its April 7, 1952, article on Truman’s dropping out. Near Antonyms for incumbent. TIME reported that McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary was a statement that was “as much anti-Johnson as antiwar,” citing a NBC poll that found more than half of Democrats didn’t even know McCarthy’s position on Vietnam. He would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first.” On top of that, Buchanan and his supporters felt betrayed by Bush’s having broken his famous campaign pledge, “Read my lips: No new taxes.”. You have 2 free articles left. Incumbent GOP Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida’s 26th Congressional District was ousted by Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. At the time, Democrats were bitterly divided. © 2021 TIME USA, LLC. There is definitely a relationship between G.D.P. You have a limited number of free articles. So just being challenged is not a good sign.”. "[4] Voters will first grapple with the record of the incumbent. Obama beat … For most political offices, the incumbent often has more name recognition due to their previous work in the office. On Election Night , Bushnell trailed Fennell by 239 votes, out of a total of 7,171 ballots cast in the Second District race. As Buchanan framed the difference between the candidates, while launching his campaign in December 1991: “[Bush] is a globalist and we are nationalists. For comprehensive election results, click here. In 1952, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver challenged President Harry S. Truman for the Democratic Party nomination. [8], Nick Panagakis, a pollster, coined what he dubbed the incumbent rule in 1989—that any voter who claims to be undecided towards the end of the election will probably end up voting for a challenger.[9]. You have 3 free articles left. In France, the phenomenon is known by the catchphrase "Sortez les sortants" (get out the outgoing [representatives]!) Steve Russell An incumbent in an office or position is the one who current holds it (as opposed to some elected or appointed for it, but not yet installed into the position, such as a president-elect or a chair-designate). But, it isn’t a perfect one. Barbara A. Perry, the Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, who spoke to TIME as part of a presidential-history partnership between TIME History and the Miller Center, points out that those 1912 primaries were products of the progressive-era populist movement, as former President Teddy Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to unseat incumbent President William Taft by forming the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party. Some of the first primaries were held in 1912. From left: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford, on the June 21, 1976, cover of TIME, Michael Evans; Dirck Halstead; Paul Keating, Conservative Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan displaying The New Hampshire, Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection—Getty Images, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election. inconsequential, insignificant, An incumbent is an individual who is responsible for a specific office within a corporation or government position such as a director or an officer. You have reached your limit of 4 free articles. Political analysts in the United States and United Kingdom have noted the existence of a sophomore surge (not known as such in the United Kingdom) in which first term representatives see an increase in votes in their first election. But Trump is not alone. 3 : lying or resting on something else. 1 : imposed as a duty : obligatory incumbent on us to take action. Except when the timing of elections is determined by a constitution or by legislation, the incumbent may have the right to determine the date of an election. Democratic Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton ended up winning the general election. “The conventional wisdom is that primary opponents harm incumbents in the general election, although this is hard to prove,” says Robert G. Boatright, editor of The Routledge Handbook of Primary Elections. When newcomers look to fill an open office, voters tend to compare and contrast the candidates' qualifications, positions on political issues, and personal characteristics in a relatively straightforward way. Candidates didn’t usually have to compete in all of the primaries until party reforms in the early 1970s made primaries (rather than party leaders) key to determining who gets the nomination. All else equal, redistricting has reduced the probability of incumbent reelection over time. President Gerald Ford — who was elected to the House of Representatives, but became first Vice President then President thanks to the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon — was vulnerable, thanks especially his unpopular decision to pardon Nixon. In the general election, Democratic Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter ended up winning for, as pundits said, being the opposite of Nixon. The same goes for politics. Meanwhile, Truman would tie Richard Nixon for the dubious honor of the lowest approval ratings upon leaving office. Even though he didn’t win the nomination, he changed the entire state of the race. "This has been declared an unlawful assembly," officers informed Black Lives Matter activists in Salem, … “If our parties are becoming more monolithic, then who is there to challenge?”. You have 1 free article left. What is the synonym of successor? dispensable, unnecessary, unneeded, unwanted. For the full story, go here. He racked up 1,187 delegates compared to Ronald Reagan’s 1,070, which was barely more than the 1,130 he needed to secure the nomination. On top of that, once it became clear that World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower was poised to get the Republican nomination, Truman, whose Administration had been entangled in scandals in 1951, realized he probably wouldn’t be able to win anyway. approach, we –nd evidence of the opposite e⁄ect. 22, 1968, cover of TIME. Tovote "non-incumbent" would mean to vote for the challenger to theincumbent's position. Johnson was the first president to be impeached, in February 1868, so he didn’t get either party’s nomination. What is the opposite of Incumbent On? Someone who wants that position would be a candidate for it, an aspirant to it, or an applicant for it. For the five midterms before 2014, in years when voters were less likely to say incumbents deserved to serve another term, the incumbent re-election rate in the U.S. House of Representatives was lower. In political campaigns, the 'defending champion' in an election is called the incumbent. The incumbent is the current holder of a political office. Carter won 36 primaries that year, but Kennedy’s 12 victories included important ones in New York and California, and he didn’t concede until Aug. 11, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Popularly known as the anti-incumbency factor, situations of this kind occur when the incumbent has proven himself not worthy of office during his tenure and the challengers demonstrate this to the voters. which was the slogan of the Poujadist movement in the 1956 French legislative election. If the actual timing of the closing was a critical term of any agreement, then it was incumbent on the Respondent to stipulate that in his offer. The opposite of what Trump suggested. He has challengers in the 2020 Republican primary, most notably, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, former South Carolina congressman Mark Sanford and former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh. When Kefauver won the New Hampshire primary — the first primary of the campaign season — Truman decided not to run for re-election. But some politicking by Ford’s strategists enabled the incumbent president to edge out his opponent. Elections featuring an incumbent, on the other hand, are, as Guy Molyneux puts it, "fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent. For example, in an election for president, the incumbent is the person holding or acting in the office of president before the election, whether seeking re-election or not. In 1996, there were 80 CDs, while in 2016, there were 31. When Kefauver won the New Hampshire primary — the first primary of the campaign season — Truman decided not to run for re-election. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Attorney General Robert Kennedy jumped into the race. This is your last free article. As TIME reported in the April 12, 1968, article on Johnson dropping out, “So low had Johnson’s popularity sunk, said one Democratic official, that last-minute surveys before the Wisconsin primary gave him a humiliating 12% of the vote there.” But even with Johnson out of the race, his decisions on Vietnam plagued his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee. Antonyms for incumbent. A poll has become the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Here's the History of Primary Challenges to Incumbent Presidents. Unlike his brothers, “Kennedy could not articulate any appreciation of the economic anguish of Middle Americans,” as TIME put it back then. The word "incumbent" is derived from the Latin verb incumbere, literally meaning "to lean or lay upon" with the present participle stem incumbent-, "leaning a variant of encumber,[1] while encumber is derived from the root cumber,[2] most appropriately defined: "To occupy obstructively or inconveniently; to block fill up with what hinders freedom of motion or action; to burden, load."[3]. Ronald Reagan went on to win the general election, and Carter’s loss made Democratic Party officials think that perhaps they needed to once again have more of a role in choosing the nominee — leading to the introduction of superdelegates as part of the nominating process for the 1984 election. Any candidate would face trouble securing widespread support. Synonyms for incumbent in Free Thesaurus. and election results. Bush faced a challenge from more conservative Pat Buchanan — but that wasn’t the only time a sitting President has had to fight for his spot on the ballot. (Democratic President Franklin Pierce, who ended up winning the 1852 election, also lost his party’s nomination after one term, as many Northern Democrats felt his support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act was too conciliatory to pro-slavery Southerners.) In fact, the system in use today is only about 50 years old. Subscribe for just $18. “Battered by the Vietnam War, Watergate, scandals and abuses in high places,” TIME noted in a cover story that year, “many Americans clearly welcome Carter’s confidence in them and the worth of their country, and his soft-spoken promise to restore a moral purpose to national life.”. From the very beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump has never really left “campaign mode” — but as the next election gets closer, that approach has turned into a more concrete play for victory in 2020. [5] This means that the incumbency advantage gets more significant as political polarization increases. In general, re-election rates of incumbent members of Congress are high, but there are fluctuations in how high. This sentiment can also lead to support for term limits. Pictured (center), Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, (R), puts his arm around Senator Edward M. Kennedy (L) as he arrived at Logan International Airport in Boston on Sep. 30, 1976, for a four-hour campaign blitz. Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) on the Mar. Incumbent … At the DNC, he endorsed Carter in a sentence and laid out the Democratic Party’s vision in what TIME called “the speech of his life” in his 2009 obituary. The number of competitive districts is in decline, which may make it difficult for candidates to swing the vote for that district in the opposite direction. Senator Ted Kennedy, the brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Both Tyler and Fillmore, who were Whig Party presidents, were denied the nomination because the political battles surrounding slavery: Tyler in 1844, over the annexation of Texas, which he supported but which would upset the balance of free and slave states; Fillmore in 1852 over his support of the Fugitive Slave Act. 24, 1952, cover of TIME. The incumbent is the current holder of an office or position, usually in relation to an election. However, there exist scenarios in which the incumbency factor itself leads to the downfall of the incumbent. [citation needed] Also, an open contest is created when the term of office is limited, as in the case of terms of the U.S. president being restricted to two four-year terms, and the incumbent is prohibited from recontesting. cumbency and elections, incumbent-free contests like those of 2000 and 2008 loom as even-up propositions in terms of either party s probable success. A 2017 study in the British Journal of Political Science argues that the incumbency advantage stems from the fact that voters evaluate the incumbent's ideology individually whereas they assume that any challenger shares his party's ideology. SALEM, Oregon, (Sputnik) - When the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was kicking off his victory speech, on the opposite side of the United States his most radical black-clad allies hit a police cordon on their march to confront the most violent defenders of Republican incumbent Donald Trump. That may be one reason why it’s not more common for Presidents today to get primary challengers, even though the current system of primaries gives party leaders less power to steer the selection process. Estes Kefauver on the Mar. While President Lyndon B. Johnson won the New Hampshire primary on March 12, 1968, politicos thought he should have beaten radical anti-war Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota by a larger margin than the seven points with which he pulled it off. Opposite of an act of assigning a job or position to someone. When he decided to challenge President George H.W. In general, an incumbent has a political advantage over challengers at elections. Opposite of the act or process of choosing or selecting. Oil price increases one year before an election systematically lower the odds of incumbents being re-elected. Crucially, it’s difficult to establish cause and effect when a challenged incumbent loses the general election. Find 7 ways to say INCUMBENT, along with antonyms, related words, and example sentences at Thesaurus.com, the world's most trusted free thesaurus. [5] A 2017 study in the Journal of Politics found that incumbents have "a far larger advantage" in on-cycle elections than in off-cycle elections.[6]. At the time, Democrats were bitterly divided. I provided many examples, including a Gallup poll according to which then-Republican candidate Mitt Romney would beat incumbent Democrat Barack Obama 50 percent to 49 percent in 2012. chosen, discretionary. All Rights Reserved. Protesters took to the street during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to protest the fact that Humphrey won the nomination without campaigning in a primary, and Humphrey went on to lose the Presidential election to former Vice President Richard Nixon. For example, in 2020, Donald Trump was the incumbent president seeking reelection, while the Democratic canidate Joe Biden was a challenger to the incumbent. Elections in which an incumbent president is running typically are referenda on the job performance of the incumbent. This campaign is the first time an incumbent president has faced a challenger with name recognition within his own party since 1992, when Republican president George H.W. The nomination was still up for grabs when the Republican National Convention started in Kansas City, Mo., but Ford eked out win the day before the convention was supposed to end. Subscribe for just $18. Opposite of the best or most desirable among a category, kind or class. Find 7 ways to say incumbent, along with antonyms, related words, and example sentences at Thesaurus.com, the world's most trusted free thesaurus. Party leaders still hold critical sway behind the scenes and can discourage people from running altogether, and, adds Noel, fewer people may be interested in disagreeing with a President from within a party anyway. Opposite of an election or the process of voting. “It’s probably not that the challenge itself weakened the nominee,” says Noel, “but the fact that they were weak drew their challenge in the first place. “New rules make it easier for anyone to run,” says Hans Noel, professor of Government at Georgetown University and co-author of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform, “but also created more need for informal pressure for making sure things don’t go awry.”. Antonyms for Incumbent On (opposite of Incumbent On). The Northern Democrats had spearheaded the addition of a civil rights plank to the party platform at the 1948 convention, leadin… That’s the exact margin that his opponent in the 2020 election, President Trump, deemed a “landslide” in 2016. In the United States, an election (especially for a single-member constituency in a legislature) in which an incumbent is not seeking re-election is often called an open seat; because of the lack of incumbency advantage, these are often amongst the most hotly contested races in any election. From the 1790s through 2000, omitting the peculiar multi-candidate election of 1824, parties holding the American presidency lost it exactly half the time when they did not run incumbent candidates. It would be a mistake, however, to call 2010 an anti-incumbent election because 52 of the 54 defeated House incumbents and all three of the defeated Senate incumbents were Democrats. This content is part of Ballotpedia's analysis of the 2018 midterm elections. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the old Republic. And Arthur, who succeeded President James Garfield, was denied the 1884 Republican nomination, though he didn’t actively seek it because he was suffering from kidney disease. 2 : having the status of an incumbent (see incumbent entry 1) the team's incumbent third baseman especially : occupying a specified office the incumbent mayor. Only if they decide to "fire" the incumbent do they begin to evaluate whether each of the challengers is an acceptable alternative. @Sunshine31 - Clearly in the 1980 election there was an anti-incumbent feeling that hurt Jimmy Carter and some wonder if we will have a repeat of the results in the 2012 election. Notably, four incumbents who were denied the nomination in the 19th century — John Tyler, Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur — had been Vice Presidents who rose to the Presidency following the deaths of their predecessors, perhaps suggesting they’d never won their parties’ full support in the first place. noun: inconsequential, noncurrent, dispensable, optional, subjacent, unwanted, voluntary, discretionary, chosen, insignificant, nonessential, elective, unneeded, unimportant. Even after that period, not all primaries can be evaluated the same way. This sentiment can also lead to support for term limits.