Voters Want Something Different, Just Not Sure What
By Wes Keene | April 4, 2010 | In Category: Elections
Congressional approval is always low. That’s a unsurprising once some analysis is applied. Sure, Ben Nelson and his ilk make most of America burn with anger, but when it’s your representative bringing home pork, you are likely to be less angry. A March 22nd poll by Rasmussen Reports shows that just over a tenth of Americans feel Congress does a good or excellent job. From that, it sounds like we’re getting all new Congressmen this fall, right? Wrong. That theory begins to fall apart with this part of the poll:
“But 64% say Congress is doing a poor job. The good news is that’s a seven-point improvement from last month’s 71%, the highest negative grade recorded in over 40 months of tracking. The bad news is that 64% is the second worst grade the legislators have earned in that same time period and is up 21 points from late March a year ago.”
64% is bad, but it’s not bad enough. Time and time again, no matter how people view Congress as a whole, they tend to believe their own Representative is doing better than the others. This poll was taken just before the health care reform vote. The scary part is that as it became more clear that Congress was going to ram the health care bill through, their ratings actually improved. So we can conclude that some respondents in both polls were left-wing voters who were only upset that Congress wasn’t acting aggressively enough to enact the legislation in the previous polling period.
In New York it would appear even more dire for incumbent State legislators:
“A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of New York voters finds that 69% think it would be better if most incumbents in the state legislature were defeated this November.”
So what? As I’ve written before, we re-elect 90% of Congress people no matter how much we hate them. It seems that taking the chance on an unknown candidate is perceived to be too great a risk. Well, let’s say we could take the voters who got polled at their word and that they represent the mood of the country pretty adequately, where does it leave us? If 64% of Congress were to actually get the boot in November (which isn’t possible since not every Senate seat is up), who would we replace them with?
Well if the recent generic ballot poll Rasmussen conducted is correct, we’ll be hiring a lot more of the same:
“46% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate, up three points from last week, while 39% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent”
That poll was conducted after the health care vote. We see that Republicans are gaining in popularity, slightly. The bad news for Republicans is that Democrats are too.
“Voter support for Democrats is at its highest level measured since early December 2009, while GOP support matches the highest level measured since weekly tracking began in early April 2007.”
Democrats actually picked up some points by voting for the controversial health care bill. What’s interesting about this poll is that we see a gap of 15% between the total electorate and supports of Republicans and Democrats combined. Wow! Guess that means 15% of people will vote for an independent candidate (hopefully conservative) right? Wrong again. It only happened once, when Ross Perot got 18.9% of the popular vote, and not even one electoral vote.
Voters want real change, or at least they always say they do. When it comes to the voting booth, however, they rarely mean what they say. More likely, is an outcome where we repeat the pattern of the last few decades. We’ll simply shift the power in favor of one party, and then the other after a short time. Each time we get sick of Democrats we just elect some Republicans. Then we get bored with low taxes and high debt, and move back to the Democrats where we’ll get higher taxes and high debt. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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