About 2,300 running for Congress, most in decades
Discontent with incumbents and anti-Washington anger are adding up to a potentially record-breaking crowd of congressional challengers this election year.
More than 2,300 people are running for 471 House and Senate seats in the midterms. It's the highest number of candidates in at least 35 years, according to data provided to The Associated Press by the Federal Election Commission, which began tracking candidates in 1975.
Frustration, particularly on the right, with President Barack Obama and his Democratic agenda appears to have contributed to the surge. The field is heavily Republican, with almost twice as many GOP candidates as Democrats, and several hundred independent and third-party challengers.
2,341 people [have] filed statements of candidacy with the FEC for the 2010 House and Senate elections, compared with 1,717 in 2008 and 1,588 in 2006.
The tally is still climbing, with more than a dozen states still allowing candidates to file, and the true number of candidates is probably higher, since some ignore requirements to file with the FEC. Close to 40 states still haven't held their primaries, including nine with primaries in September. The general election is Nov. 2.
The field is significantly larger than in 1976, two years after the Watergate scandal took down President Richard Nixon, and 1994, the year the GOP took control of Congress for the first time in four decades.
The next-largest field - of 2,159 candidates - was in 1992, when Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot battled for the White House.
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