It is becoming blatantly obvious the the Republicans in Congress simply don't care what the American people think of them. Either that, or they think they can lie their way to victory at the polls (by appealing to the fears and hatreds of the voting populace). They have made up their minds that their policies and ideologies are the correct ones, regardless of what the public thinks.This is shown by poll after poll. Now a new poll, the NBC News / Wall Street Journal Poll, verifies what numerous other polls have shown -- that the Republicans in Congress are not respected. This survey shows the positive opinion (24%) of the Republicans is far below the negative opinion (47%) -- a difference of a whopping 23 points. And they don't seem to be making any progress in lowering that big difference. In fact, it is much larger than it was two years ago -- with the negative being 13 points higher than the positive in January of 2012 (compared to today's 23 points).
Now you may think that the public also disapproves of the Democrats, and that would be true -- but not by anywhere near as big a margin as the Republicans. The positive opinion of Democrats is 37% and the negative opinion is 40% -- only a 3 point difference (20 points lower than the GOP difference).
I think a lot of the negative opinions are due to the desire of the public for Congress to fix the poor economy and create new jobs. They want the two parties to compromise for the good of the country -- and as the chart below shows, they blame the Republicans for not being flexible enough to compromise. More than half of the population says the Republicans are too inflexible.
This should worry Republicans running for re-election -- especially those in the 50 or so competitive districts. If they lose just 17 of those districts, the House would flip to Democratic control.
This NBC News / Wall Street Journal Poll was done between January 22nd and 25th of a random national sample of 800 adults, and has a margin of error of 3.46 points.
