A new Gallup poll shows that a huge majority of Democrats don’t approve of the job Congress is doing under Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) leadership. Only 25% of Democrats polled said they approved of how Congress is doing its job, down seven points since February.
Among all political affiliations, Congress’s job approval rating is a dismal 20 percent. This number is a decline from 26 percent in March, which was a two-year high.
Poll Results by Party
After Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January, their party’s approval jumped 10 points to 32 percent. Those gains have largely disappeared in the four months since.
Republicans saw a huge 22-point drop in approval of Congress’s job performance since October 2018, dropping from 36 percent approval to only 14 percent in the recent poll. Approval under independents has remained more steady at 22 percent, up from 10 percent in January 2017.
The poll asked 1009 U.S. adults their opinion about Congress’s job performance and weighted the responses to account for slight differences in gender and other identifications. Approval of Congress is historically low; it has only risen above 21 percent three times since 2011.
Historically, congressional job approval reached a high of 84 percent in 2002 just after the 9/11 terror attacks. It sank to an all-time low of 9 percent in 2014 amid a flagging economic recovery after the 2008-9 housing crisis and Obama’s re-election. Republicans picked up 13 House seats in the election that year.
Between 1998 and 2005, congressional job approval mostly stayed between 40 – 60%, but was under 40 percent both before and after those years. The factors that drive congressional job approval may be complex, but one dynamic is the difficulty of pleasing a diverse constituency with a myriad of different needs and desires.
Polls Agree: Congress Unsatisfactory
A RealClearPolitics aggregate of several major polls was remarkably consistent with the Gallup poll. In RCP’s average of major polls, 20.2% of the overall population approved of the job Congress is doing between April 8 and May 21.
An average of 69.2 percent disapproved of Congress’s job in the RCP average. Gallup did not measure disapproval numbers in its poll.
Previous polls have shown that people generally rate their own congressional representatives significantly higher than Congress in general, similarly to presidential job approval numbers that are usually a plurality, a few points short of a majority, when a representative sample of all parties is used.
Could it be that Democrats as a whole don’t favor far-left policies like open borders, unrestricted abortions, and investigation after frivolous investigation into President Donald Trump? No specific questions were asked about why so many Democrat voters disapprove of Congress even as Democrats now run the House.
Pelosi needs to get a handle on why most Democrats don’t like her leadership and what they actually want from their lawmakers before her support erodes even more.
No comments: