Okay, nobody else has had anything else to say about it....
At 11% approval rating for congress I expect a lot of incumbents to be given the bums rush.
National approval ratings for Congress do not equate
at all to local/state-level election results. Sub-25% approval ratings for Congress are nothing new, but then, neither is the 80-90% incumbency rate. Start looking at individual Representative's and Senator's approval ratings exclusively among their constituents, and the tapestry of Congressional upheaval you've woven in your mind will unravel.
Remember that the power-switch in Congress in 2006 took twelve years, and the Republican Revolution of 1994 was an affair that took four-decades to come to fruition. Ousting Ted Stevens took over forty years, and he wasn't actually voted out, despite being one of the most reviled characters in the Senate.
All politics are local, even if the polls you read are not. In Knoxville, you will find that Jimmy Duncan, Lamar Alexander, and Bob Corker are revered for appropriating federal dollars to worthy projects in the Second Congressional District and Tennessee as a whole. It's those other 532 bastards who are wasteful porkbarrel spenders, who need to be hefted out of their seats in Congress with a prybar. Replace names of people and places as appropriate for whatever locality you are in or researching.
It's a round-about and not-altogether-ethical way to do it, but Volkswagon factories and bridges to nowhere buy a lot of votes in a reelection bid, so the incumbency rate stays high. A Hoosier doesn't see the benefits of a tax-break to Volkswagon for building a factory in Tennessee or an appropriation to build multimillion-dollar bridges to remote Alaskan islands, so people in Indiana disapprove of these appropriations. People in Kentucky disapprove of these appropriations. People in Washington disapprove of these appropriations, etc., etc., etc. They feel as though they're getting screwed, even though they may be benefitting from the same kind of dubious activities on the part of their own Congressional delegation, thereby screwing everyone back.
Why does it continue? Because it's always the other 532 people on Capitol Hill at fault. Congress won't alter a system that allows its members comfortable reelection, and the rules of Congressional appropriation are governed by none but Congress. (The Supreme Court might be able to overturn a rule, if a member of Congress sued, but the problem is a lack of rules in this particular area.) The executive branch briefly demonstrated some power to curtail such spending, for the period in which the President had line-item veto authority, but that power won't be coming back without a Constitutional amendment. Would Congress draft such an amendment? Would three-quarters of the state legislatures approve it? Would anybody, save a future President even call for it, and if such a President did make that request, would it not simply be shot down as a power-grab? Key: no, no, no, yes
So Congress has built itself a brick house of incumbency, and you can huff and puff, and build a typhoon of national-level dissatisfaction, but you won't blow that house down (or strain that metaphor any harder).
For what it's worth, that's not a defense of the existing system; just a realistic look at why INTERNET RAGE® isn't going to bring it down, even on the outside chance that enough incumbents are ousted to force the majority party out. I, for one, have been voting against the incumbents of Tennessee's Congressional delegation for the last eight-ish years, but this area has been what you might call 'reliably red' since about the time the Civil Rights Act got passed.
tl;dr - All politics are local, and career politicians write laws to extend the length of their careers.
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