Republican officials are wanting to act like the voters gave them a mandate to implement their extremist policies (since they now have control over both houses of Congress). But that is simply not true. They benefitted from having the more energized voters in an election in which an embarrassingly small percentage of voters bothered to vote. And the reason few went to the polls is because, as the charts above show, most Americans are disgusted with Congress and both political parties. Note that the huge disapproval of both parties is about the same (well within the survey's margin of error).
No one got any kind of mandate, and if the Republicans try to act like they did, they could easily be spanked hard by the voters in 2016 (when much larger numbers of Independents and Democrats will be voting, due to the presidential election). The truth is the voters are disgusted with Congress in general, and they want the two parties to finally compromise to get the country and the economy going again. And any failure at real compromise is going to be viewed very dimly by voters.
These charts were made from a Quinnipiac University Poll done between November 18th and 23rd of a random national sample of 1,623 registered voters, with a 2.4 point margin of error.
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That same survey queried respondents in each political party about their choices for their party's presidential nomination in 2016. The charts below show those results -- with the GOP charts showing both with and without Romney, and the Democratic charts showing results both with and without Clinton. (Margin of error is 3.7 points for Republicans and 4 points for Democrats.)
