WASHINGTON -- Something rare, and potentially significant, happened in Maryland's election this week, and it had nothing to do with picking a new president.
Two incumbent congressmen, a Democrat and a Republican, were defeated in party primaries in the same state on the same day. According to the Hotline, an online political newsletter, that hasn't happened, for reasons other than redistricting, in 16 years.
The last time, it signaled the start of an anti-incumbent wave that crested two years later with the toppling of 40 years of Democratic rule in the House of Representatives.
Republican Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest was unseated by a more conservative challenger on Maryland's Eastern Shore, while Democratic Rep. Albert R. Wynn lost to a more liberal rival in the Washington suburbs.
They were defeated "basically for not adhering to party orthodoxy. That's a significant thing," said Bruce Cain, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It really tells you something about this change theme," he said. "Voters may be saying, `While we're changing things at the top, we'll change some other things. ... It certainly suggests that there's no deference to incumbency, if people feel that an incumbent has taken positions that they're annoyed with."
Incumbents in Congress win re-election more than 95 percent of the time. Except for being redistricted onto unfavorable turf, they generally lose because they get pulled under by a national wave, generated by a troubled economy or an unpopular war, or fall victim to a scandal.
That's what happened when two Arkansas congressmen - both with large numbers of overdrafts in a scandal involving the House bank - lost in a 1992 primary. That year started an anti-incumbent wave that peaked in November 1994 and cost Democrats control of the House.
The Maryland primary "confirms what we've been saying all along, which is that no incumbent is truly safe in this environment," said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The public is giving Congress unusually low job ratings this year, but independent analysts say they don't expect changes in control of either house of Congress this year. In part, that's because Republicans are defending more vulnerable seats than the Democratic majority.
But David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said the twin defeats in Maryland "would not have happened if an anti-incumbent mood had not taken root around the country."
