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The advantage of incumbency has long intrigued students of congressional elections. Whether measured at individual or aggregate levels, by re-election rates or voting margins, the advantage has been striking: simply knowing that there is an incumbent in the contest supplies a major predictor of the vote. The person in office – the incumbent – is overwhelmingly likely to win re-election and to win by larger margins than victorious non-incumbents.
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Barbara Hinckley (1980) studied this question.
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