No confidence in Congress: From the National Journal’s PollTrack analysis of public and congressional insiders opinion polls:
Texas Rep. Tom DeLay’s (R) troubles are leaving his colleagues in Congress guessing at the future of the GOP leadership in National Journal’s Congressional Insiders poll.
Today’s CNN/Gallup/USA Today numbers don’t have much good news for the GOP, either. Half of respondents said they viewed the party negatively, a 5-point jump since Gallup’s mid-September numbers. Four in 10 said they held favorable views of the Republican Party.
Democrats, on the other hand, saw a 5-point gain in favorability, with the party’s positive number rising to 52% and the negative number dropping 4 points to 36%.
Numbers like that might make congressional Democrats more optimistic about their own prospects in the next election cycle. Twenty of the 35 Democratic insiders predicted a switch in party control that would put current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in the the House speaker’s chair in 2007. Ten said current speaker Dennis Hastert would keep his post.
Republicans overwhelmingly predicted that the Illinois Republican would get to keep his current job, with 28 of the 41 polled saying Hastert would continue on in 2007. (A candidate for speaker needs an absolute majority vote to be elected by his or her peers.)Just three Republicans chose interim House Majority Leader Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who took the helm after DeLay stepped down. Blunt’s brief tenure so far has been plagued with setbacks, the Wall Street Journal reports, with a close call on passage of the energy bill and a frustrating delay on budget cuts.
Democrats shouldn’t get too excited, though: CNN/Gallup/USA Today respondents were less enthusiastic about lawmakers on both sides of the aisle than they were in the last survey. Forty-five percent said the country would be better off if the Democrats controlled Congress and 32% said the same of Republicans. Both of those numbers were down — 2 points for the Democrats and 4 for the GOP — from a May survey.
And those figures echo other recent surveys showing Congress’ overall ratings on the decline; an earlier release from the same poll put legislators’ approval at just 29 percent, its lowest level in more than a decade.
