Incumbents enjoy an enormous advantage during re-election. This is due to a few reasons:

• Name recognition.

• Ability to fundraise. As the cost of Congressional campaigns has reached into the millions, the ability to fundraise has gotten even more important.

• Constituent services, which builds goodwill with voters.

• The Franking Privilege, which allows incumbents to send taxpayer-funded mail to constituents and provides free name recognition and communication.

The incumbency advantage is so powerful it leads to incumbents winning re-election 95% of the time. An incumbent simply announcing re-election clears the field of most contenders. Here in District 8, the current incumbent has run unopposed in three out of the last four elections.

This reduces the healthy competition that gives voters choices and keeps our democracy strong. It reduces accountability by allowing incumbents to win re-election on their enormous built-in advantages rather than their merits. Often, voters feel a sense of resignation about voting for the incumbent, but the current primary system leaves them little choice.

Reform primaries to reduce the incumbency advantage

We need to reform primaries to counteract the incumbency advantage. One option is to implement an Open Primary Top Two system. This system allows all voters to vote for any candidate of any political party in the primary, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election.