Chattanooga voters may not believe it, but they’re outliers when it comes to re-electing incumbents.
Oh, to be sure, city residents re-elect their share of office-holders, but their percentage in doing so is nowhere near the percentage of, say, United States House members who are re-elected every two years.
Indeed, since the city changed to a mayor-council form of government before the 1990 election, no Chattanooga mayor has lost re-election if he sought it, but only 74.2% of Chattanooga City Council members have won re-election. Compare that to U.S. House elections from 1964 through 2024, where the low was 85.4% of members re-elected in 2010, but the high — and closer to being typical of most years — was 98.4% of members re-elected in 1998.
If you need more evidence, only two Tennessee governors in the last 100 years (Democrats Gordon Browning and Jim McCord lost their party’s nomination in 1938 and 1948, respectively) have been turned away when seeking re-election, and only two out of 47 incumbents in 3rd District House races in the last century (Democrat James B. Frazier lost his party’s nomination in 1962, and Republican LaMar Baker lost in the general election in the Watergate year of 1974) have been defeated by voters.
Last Tuesday’s city runoff election added two more to the list of City Council incumbents returned to office. And, interestingly, neither was elected in the last city election in 2021.