Republican congressional leaders have sought to frame the upcoming midterms as a referendum on Democrats and their ability to govern, but six in 10 Americans have a negative view of the very GOP chiefs making the argument. That level of GOP unpopularity leaves the Democrats some campaign leverage against their GOP critics with less than a month to go before Election Day.
The latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center, shows that Republican leaders on Capitol Hill drew a spare 24 percent approval rating, down from 33 percent in July, while their disapproval figure had climbed up 7 points from 53 percent, tied for their worst performance in the nine-plus years since Pew has asked about House and Senate barons in both parties.
Democratic leaders did slightly better with a 30/53 approval/disapproval split on the same question, leaving their net margin roughly unchanged since July, when the GOP had outperformed them. Still, their approval rating was their lowest since at least June 2001.
While party leaders had little to fear from their own party faithful, their approval ratings are down in the dumps among independents, with one one-fifth of them approving of the ways party leaders were doing their jobs. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans approved of GOP leaders' job performance, while 33 percent disapproved, numbers that flipped across the spectrum: 8 percent of Democrats approved, while 82 percent disapproved. Meanwhile, 19 percent of independents approved of the jobs GOP leaders were doing, while 64 percent disapproved. Democrats gave Capitol Hill powerbrokers in their own party a 62 percent approval of that question, while 23 percent disapproved. Five percent of Republicans approved of how Democratic leaders did their jobs, while 90 percent disapproved. Among independents, 21 percent approved and 60 percent disapproved. The last time GOP congressional leaders had taken such strong medicine was exactly a year ago, when they drew identical numbers. Democrats saw their approval ratings bottom out in the latest poll, but the disapproval figure was down 3 points from July. The survey of 1,002 adults, conducted Thursday through Sunday, carries an error margin of 4 percent for the entire sample, with larger error margins for subgroups.