Despite slogans from the populist movements on the right calling on voters to "throw the bums out," that is to say, to defeat all Congressional incumbents, 86% of the bums who were up for reelection in 2010 actually kept their jobs, as Catherine Rampell points out at the New York Times Economix blog. Taken as a whole, incumbents took 65% of the vote this year, just a bit lower than the 68% that they have averaged since 1972. Rampell seems to take this to mean that 2010 wasn't a bad year for incumbents.

Yet, given their tremendous advantages in fund-raising and name-recognition, and the fact that many sit in districts gerrymandered to make them nearly impossible for the incumbent party to lose, 14% is a remarkably high rate of loss. Indeed, as the graph below shows, this year was, by far, the worst year for incumbents since 1972, blowing away the so-called "revolution" of 1994.