I am still hearing political pundits say the Republicans will retain control of the House of Representatives in the coming election because of the unpopularity of President Obama. I have to wonder just what kind of dream world these pundits are living in. Not only was the president elected by large margins twice, but his approval ratings remain much higher than those of Congress.
The chart above show the approval ratings of both the president and Congress over the last two months. Note that the approval ratings of the president have not dipped below 44% during August and September. That's the kind of approval the House can only dream about. Congressional approval has never climbed above 14% in that same time period. That's a 30 point gap on Congress' best day and the president's worst day (and most of the time the gap is even larger -- currently 34.4 points).
I can understand why the congressional Republicans want to make this an election about how "unpopular" the president is -- since they certainly don't want to talk about their own unpopularity (or the voter anger with Congress). But why are the pundits falling for that silly argument? Do not not have to ability to read the polls consistently showing voter disapproval of Congress? Can they not fathom that this election is about voter anger with Congress -- and not about the president?
The voters are in an angry anti-incumbent mood -- and it's not the president they want to kick out of office -- it's the members of Congress. They are tired of Congress playing ideological games instead of compromising to fix the economy and create jobs. We're probably going to see a lot of new faces in Congress come January -- and there's a real possibility that a majority of those new faces will be Democrats.
The numbers in the chart above for the president are from the Rasmussen Poll -- which does a daily average of the previous three days (with 500 voters queried each of those days) to get the days approval number. The numbers for Congress are the average of all polls done at RealClearPolitics.
