When President Obama delivers the final State of the Union address of his first term tomorrow, he will face, literally, the most unpopular Congress in polling’s history. All recent polls put Congress’s rating below 15 percent. One pollster saw it dip below 10 percent in 2011, and others have proclaimed in their releases that Congress’s standing in 2012 was lower than ever before. Democrats there tend to be a little more popular than Republicans, but their marks aren’t good either.
Individuals are usually more popular than institutions, and President Obama’s ratings are higher than Congress’s. As Senator John McCain joked with reporter Mark Shields, Congress’s approval is “down to blood relatives and paid staffers.” The chart below in the latest ABC/Washington Post poll demonstrates how low Congress has fallen.
The new issue of AEI’s Political Report looks at views on the State of the Union.
print this page
Since persons are more popular than institutions, analyses such as this are apples to oranges when comparing Congress to the President and mislead the public. Perhaps a more meaningful survey would be between a given Senator or Representative and his specific constituents. From this data, a more accurate composite data point of 635 individual findings might be constructed to represent how the public really feels about Congress. There are many good representatives in Congress and there a the bad. If you ask my opinion of Congress, I will give it based on the bad while I may think rather highly of my state’s Senator or my district’s Representative. The current survey techniques used to measure Congress’ approval don’t really measure anything of value and are therefore, useless.