Given all the hype in 1990 about an “anti-incumbent” mood that was supposed to have swept the electorate, it is not too surprising that immediately after the congressional elections of that year most pundits claimed to see clear evidence of this mood in the results. But it is surprising that now, as we approach the next election day, more relaxed and objective analysis has not corrected this erroneous view of what actually transpired in 1990. Thus, before this misconception becomes an indelible part of conventional wisdom, and before the events of 1992, which may include something closer to an authentic anti-incumbent mood, are compared to a mistaken view of the events of 1990, we would like to offer an alternative and, we would argue, more accurate interpretation of the 1990 congressional elections.

November 6, 1990 was to have been the day the fortifications of entrenched incumbents—relentless constituency service, massive warchests, and intimidation of prospective quality challengers—were overwhelmed by the poorly-armed but righteously indignant masses. These masses were incited by brave challengers who concocted clever taunts about the insular and haughty denizens of Washington castle life. These hated insiders, it was said, were surrounded by doting courtiers, undeserved privileges, and unbelievable treasures, and the outsiders were finally going to have their revenge.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a process by which printed text is detected and transformed into a computer text file. OCR consists of two basic processes: scanning and recognition. Scanning, performed with a device called a scanner, digitizes the printed page, creating a coded graphics version of the text that may be stored on disk. That coded version transforms the scanned image into pixels, and it is readable by graphics programs.

The separate recognition process translates the picture of an “A” into the letter “A.” A new file is created in a format determined by user instructions. That file is readable by word processor, statistics, and/or database software supported by the OCR program used.

OCR is a technique that can be useful to political scientists. For example, research notes taken from printed sources, rather than being laboriously typed, could be scanned, processed, and saved as a file readable by a word processing package. Content analysis might be almost completely mechanized. Numerical data from government reports could be scanned rather than entered by hand and then made readable by a spreadsheet, database management program, or statistics package.