2010 May Not Be the Year for Incumbents

• As I noted a week or so ago, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) recently lost her fundraising firm and her chief of staff resigned, two months prior.
• Previously unreported in this space except in passing, Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) is now up to facing four primary challengers in his race for a fourth term.
• And, though he kept trying to steer the conversation back to Democratic proposals to aid small business and his own plan to reinvest TARP money, when Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) took a three-city tour on Monday, reporters kept asking about his dwindling poll numbers.

This actually seems to be developing into a national phenomenon and though I don't have any statistics at the ready, nor have I inventoried all of the incumbents, it appears that neither party is immune.

Related: Republicans will vastly outnumber Democrats on March ballot

Bogged Down in Statistics

The Cincinatti Enquirer pretty much admits that because House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has been very vocal with criticism toward the administration for reporting errors about results from the stimulus bill, they decided to play gotcha with errors to his Federal Election Commission reports.

In the process, they provide a myriad of facts and figures; The 435 members of the U.S. House received 6,397 "requests for additional information" over a six year period and they say he compares better than fellow Ohioan Dennis Kucinich or the Democrat at the top of the list, Diane Watson (D-CA), but he does much worse than the two Democrats who have had just two requests.

All in all, though the article contains lots of facts and figures, along with specific examples and it includes information about the corrections which have occurred since a former campaign treasurer was caught embezzling, most can be characterized as follows;

The FEC letters Boehner received mostly involved mundane accounting errors: figures that are inconsistent from one time period to another, summary columns that don't add up correctly, contributions to charities or other campaigns erroneously listed as operating expenditures, or contributions received that appear to exceed individual limits.