A new Wall Street Journal\/NBC News poll shows that disapproval of Congress’s performance is higher than it has been since 1994, the year voters swept Democrats out of power on Capitol Hill. Americans have grown gloomier about the nation’s direction, the economy and Iraq, and by 65%-17% they say Congress doesn’t share their priorities.<\/p>\n
“If you’re a member of Congress … you’d better be looking over your shoulder,” says Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who helps conduct the Journal\/NBC survey. His Republican counterpart, Bill McInturff, adds that a particular concern for incumbents looking to 2006 is unhappiness among senior citizens, a group that disproportionately turns out to vote in midterm elections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nAcross the board, Americans are just unhappy with what they’re seeing from their government.<\/p>\n
* Bush approval rating<\/i> — Only 47% approve of the job the president is doing.<\/p>\n
* Bush on the issues<\/i> — On the three big policy areas — handling the economy, handling foreign policy generally and handling Iraq — a majority of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of all three.<\/p>\n
* Congress’ approval rating<\/i> — Just 33% approve of lawmakers’ performance while 51% disapprove, nearly matching the 32%-56% rating Congress received six months before the “Republican revolution” of 1994.<\/p>\n
* Tom DeLay<\/i> — By 52%-12%, Americans say Congress should investigate the Texan’s travel and relationships with lobbyists. Though just over half of Americans don’t know who Mr. DeLay is or have a neutral opinion, the rest view him negatively by a two-to-one margin.<\/p>\n
* Privatizing Social Security<\/i> — Americans by 56%-36% call it a “bad idea” to allow workers to invest Social Security contributions in the stock market.<\/p>\n
* Control of Congress<\/i> — Just 42% of Americans say their representative deserves to be re-elected, while a 45% plurality calls it time for someone new. When Americans are asked which party they want to control Congress after the 2006 elections, Democrats hold a 47%-40% edge — the party’s best showing since the Journal\/NBC survey began asking that question in 1994.<\/p>\n
And my very favorite tidbit of information? The disappointment among self-identified Republicans about Republicans in Washington. The percentage of Americans who believe Congress shares their priorities is down to a stunning 17% — but the biggest drop was seen among those who consider themselves Republicans. Likewise, support of the Republican Congress by Republican voters has dropped by 11 percentage points to 45%.<\/p>\n
This isn’t just entertaining number-crunching; polls like these have a real effect — Dems feel empowered to take on a majority the public is rejecting and Republicans start pointing fingers at each other while trying to figure out why they’re failing so badly.<\/p>\n
Of course, if this data was coming out in October 2006 instead of May 2005, I’d really be giddy. Instead, it’s just a morale-booster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Looking back over the last couple of months, I really can’t remember the last time I saw polling data that Republicans could find encouraging. Since the inauguration, if not slightly before it, public support for Republican officials and their agenda has slipped — and then slipped again. This week is no exception. The latest Harris […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}