Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, yet keep reelecting incumbents.

Why?

Exit polling conducted on Election Day last month found that more than 70 percent of voters are unhappy about the direction in which the U.S. is headed. This result is consistent with a poll from later in November in which 70 percent of Americans answered “wrong track” to this question:

Generally speaking, would you say that things in the country are going in the right direction, or have they pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?

Other surveys show even more widespread dissatisfaction with the nation’s direction.

One would expect from these results that the electorate cleaned house this year — that it threw out many of the bums associated with the status quo. But this isn’t what happened.

In fact, as things stand now not a single incumbent U.S. Senator was voted out of office. Moreover, only one Senate seat — Pennsylvania’s — changed from one party to the other. The Georgia Senate seat is still being contested in a runoff, but the incumbent leads in the polls albeit within the margin of error.

What about the House? According to this report, as of November 11, only six Democrats had lost their seats: Cindy Axne of Iowa, Elaine Luria of Virginia, Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, Al Lawson of Florida, and Tom O’Halleran of Arizona. All six were competing in places where redistricting had made their chances of winning harder. On the Republican side, only three incumbents lost in the general election: Steve Chabot of Ohio, Mayra Flores of Texas, and Yvette Herrell of New Mexico.

Other incumbents were defeated earlier this year in primaries. Nonetheless, the mass reelection of incumbents in the Senate and House is hard to reconcile with the electorate’s view that things are seriously amiss in America.

In psychology, there must be a label for patients who are radically dissatisfied with their lives but refuse to change the way they live. However, it’s usually ill-advised to offer a diagnosis of the electorate.

This has never stopped Democrats and their backers from doing so. After Republicans romped to victory in 1994, Peter Jennings said the electorate had “thrown a temper tantrum.” A decade later, “what’s the matter with Kansas?” became a liberal refrain after the publication in 2004 of a book by that name, as Americans stubbornly refused to vote the way their betters thought they should.

Republicans should resist this kind of self-serving arrogance. They generally have.

These days, the response of some Republicans to electoral defeat is to allege fraud, thereby placing the blame on corrupt Democrats and election officials, rather than the electorate. But fraud and laxity can’t explain the triumph of every incumbent Senator and nearly every House member in 2022. Even if you accept it as the reason why some Democrats won, you need a different explanation for the reelection of nearly every Republican.

It isn’t sour grapes for me to wonder why nearly all incumbents were reelected by an electorate that believes, overwhelmingly, that the nation is on the path to ruin. 2022 was a disappointing year for Republicans, but a better one than 2018 (in which the House was lost) and 2020 (in which the presidency and the Senate were lost and the House stayed lost). This year, Republicans won a majority of House races for the first time since 2016. By my count, they also won 20 of 34 contested Senate seats (a defeat in Georgia would make it 20 of 35).

It’s the success of incumbents this year, not the success of a given party, that raises questions about the rationality of the electorate.

Yet, it’s possible to explain that success in rational terms. In my view, Republicans failed to defeat several incumbent Senate Democrats because they nominated very bad candidates in races against the most vulnerable ones. A voter can believe America is on the wrong track and still not want to replace an incumbent Senator with a hugely unimpressive or ridiculous opponent.

This doesn’t absolve the electorate fully — or at least its GOP branch. After all, Republicans voters selected the weak Senate candidates in question (in some cases with an assist from cynical Democrats). That they selected them at the urging of Donald Trump doesn’t lend rationality to these outcomes.

Even so, I take some comfort in believing that had the GOP nominated anything close to optimal Senate candidates in states like Georgia, Arizona, and New Hampshire, the Dem incumbents would not be looking at clean sweep.

What about the fact that no GOP Senate incumbent lost and only one seat held by a Republicans turned over? The Democrats had high hopes of unseating Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and some hope, at least early on, of unseating Marco Rubio in Florida. They were also gunning for open seats in Ohio and North Carolina. In each instance, they came up short.

These outcomes aren’t that difficult to reconcile with discontent about the country’s direction. The belief that we are on the wrong track is consistent with the desire to reelect incumbent Senators who have stood against an incumbent president. Democrat victories in Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina might have paved the way to packing the Supreme Court, statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, and other left-liberal agenda items that the electorate probably fears will take us further down the wrong track.

The reality is that of a large majority of both Democrats and Republicans believe America is on the wrong track. Accordingly, incumbent members of Congress from both parties are viewed as part of the problem (Republican members by Democrats and Democratic members by Republicans), but also as a bulwark against further regression at the hands of the opposing party.

This year, incumbents who were viewed as a bulwark against Joe Biden prevailed. So did incumbents who were viewed as a bulwark against Donald Trump. One can be unhappy with either of these outcomes, but neither is irrational.