There's an old saying that there are only two ways for an incumbent to run: scared or unopposed. Many incumbents raise money almost continuously—call it paranoid or just cautious—as if a multimillionaire self-funder were poised to announce a challenge at any moment. This year, an unusually large number of seemingly out-of-the-blue challengers came within a whisker of pulling off upsets against sitting members—and a few actually did. This suggests that some incumbents forgot to run scared.

In the House, virtually no one expected 14-term Democrat Louise Slaughter of New York to have a tough race. Yet, as of press time, she is squeaking by with a 651-vote margin, 50.1 percent to 49.8 percent. In California's Central Valley, five-term Democratic Rep. Jim Costa's race was not taken seriously by either the Fresno press corps or Beltway operatives. But at the time of this writing, Costa is trailing by 741 votes, with some votes in Fresno left to count. Then there were incumbents with credible challengers whose races wound up much closer than expected: Democratic Reps. Lois Capps (CA-24) and John Delaney

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