President George Bush isn’t the only one facing a problem of plummeting opinion polls:
Public approval of the job Congress is doing has dipped to its lowest level of 2006, and is now the worst Gallup has recorded since the closing days of the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994.
According to an April 10-13, 2006, Gallup Poll, 23% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, while 70% disapprove. The current approval score is slightly below the 25%-27% range seen since January.
The current 23% approval rating for Congress is a near-record low for the institution. Gallup’s trend for this question, which started in 1974, shows lower approval scores on only three other occasions: October 1994 (21%), March 1992 (18%), and June 1979 (19%).
Congress doesn’t do well in the approval department among ANY groups: Republicans (37%), independents (19%) or Democrats (13 %). And then Gallup has this bad news for Bush and the GOP:
This downward trend in Congress approval is parallel to the decline in public approval of President George W. Bush over the same period. Although ratings of Bush are consistently higher than those for Congress, the similar changes in approval suggest that Americans closely associate the performance of the Republican-led Congress with Bush’s performance.
Will the controversy over Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense — defended by the White House and may GOP members of Congress — help these ratings?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.