Who won? Who lost?

As I write this on Monday morning, I have no idea which candidates won what offices... except for the "sure thing" races. There always seems to be a number of those. Mostly, I think, the result of the power of incumbency. You surely acknowledge that we, as a whole, have a tendency to retain incumbents, don't you? Have you ever asked yourself "Why is that?"

Do we really like the incumbent or do we mostly re-elect him/her because of name recognition? Name recognition is important, so is the practice of putting an incumbent's name first on a list of candidates... something that used to be a constant and no longer is in many places.

I think that when we haven't thought things out deeply we tend to go with the familiar. The old phrase, "better the devil you know than the one you don't" comes to mind. We are, after all, generally risk averse.

I mused about this because of the comments for an article in the Washington Post I read today.