Analysis: 90% of Congress wins re-election

Voters apparently really, really like their own member of Congress even though the institution as a whole gets low ratings.

A whopping 90% of the House members and 91% of the senators who ran for re-election this year were returned to office, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Government (known as BGOV). That tops the 2010 re-election rates for both chambers, which were 85% and 84% respectively.

Think of it this way: The approval rating for Congress as a whole tied a record-low of 10% this year in the Gallup Poll. But as the BGOV analysis shows, voters don't hold such lowly opinions about their own members of Congress and they sent their representatives and senators back to Washington.

Turns out only two of the 23 sitting senators who wanted new terms got booted out of office, both of them Republicans. Sen. Scott Brown lost his re-election bid to Democrat Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, and Sen. Richard Lugar was defeated by Richard Mourdock in Indiana's GOP primary.

In the House, 351 out of 391 incumbents who ran for re-election won their races, according to the Bloomberg story. Redistricting is to blame in the defeat of 13 House members, who were forced to run against a fellow lawmaker because of new district boundaries.