Perhaps, but the incumbent-victory rate in national elections is very high. I think it's about 95%. That's incredible job security. It might make sense to vote for a not-bad Republican (maybe not Paladino) just to get new blood, and replace him with a real Democrat in 2-6 years.
A consequence of the two-party system (and the lack of will of the political parties to challenge their own incumbents) is that shitty Democrats are more damaging than equally shitty Republicans, because they take up that "slot" (usually; credible primary challenges are really rare) can only be replaced by Republicans.
Getting into office is really, really hard. But once these people are in, they have a sub-5% per year chance of getting fired. That's ludicrous given that (a) positions of power should be harder to keep, and (b) their performance has been awful for the past few decades.
I heard that legislators in North Korea have a lower chance of getting re-elected than U.S. legislators.
If I was the dictator of the U.S., I'd change the constitution so that Congress gets drafted. People would get selected to be Congressmen by random lottery.
I'd imagine that a good fraction of Americans chosen randomly would be corruptible, but a good fraction of them would be incorruptible, and it would be too dangerous to recruit corrupt legislators: you'd have too high of a chance of having somebody (i) call the cops, (ii) pull a gun, or (iii) punch you in the face.
The current selection process selects for :Respectable people for whom being :Respectable is accepting that other people are :Respectable. Many ordinary Americans, be they "good ol boys" or inner-city blacks, won't play that game.
Uhm, a 95% re-election rate is not a 5% chance of getting fired ever. The chance of being re-elected N times is (1-0.05)^N, so the chance of not being re-elected N times is 1 - (1 - 0.05)^N. For N = 10 (a nice twenty year run in the House), that's only ~ 60% chance of being re-elected each time. For N = 15, it drops to 46%. I think that's actually pretty reasonable, you've got enough security at the beginning to allow you some latitude but not so much that you stop caring.
