The Importance of Running Scared

Charlie Cook: “There’s an old saying that there are only two ways for an incumbent to run: scared or unopposed. Many incumbents raise money almost continuously—call it paranoid or just cautious—as if a multimillionaire self-funder were poised to announce a challenge at any moment. This year, an unusually large number of seemingly out-of-the-blue challengers came within a whisker of pulling off upsets against sitting members—and a few actually did. This suggests that some incumbents forgot to run scared.”