Congress’ Approval Ratings for Congress at an All-Time Low
By Adam Kredo
WASHINGTON, April 13 – Lawyers are more trusted in America than members of Congress, according to a Gallup Poll that measures the public’s views of honesty and ethics in professions.
When asked how they would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in different professions, 14 percent rated House members “very high” or “high” while 16 percent put senators in those two categories, according to the annual poll. But 18 percent ranked lawyers’ ethical standards very high or high.
Car salesmen were rated high or very high by eight percent, while telemarketers received the lowest rating at seven percent. All poll results were based on telephone interviews in November 2005 with a randomly selected national sample of 1,000 adults, aged 18 and older.
A separate Gallup poll released in March found that voter approval of the way Congress is doing its job rests at 27 percent. The ratings, while not unprecedented for an election year, “are among the worst Gallup has measured in more than a decade,” according to Jeffrey M. Jones, author of the report.
Congress’ approval ratings have been below 30 percent since last October and have slowly descended from a record-high post 9/11 approval rating of 84 percent, according to the report. The approval rating was at 23 percent in late October 1994, shortly before the Republican landslide that shifted majority control in Congress.
But Brian Darling, the director of Senate relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, said he doesn’t necessarily perceive a Democratic revolution.
“Many people are comparing this to 1994, when Republicans took over Congress, but I think it is a bit premature to make that kind of assessment from polls this early in the year,” Darling said in a telephone interview.
The lowest approval ratings Gallup recorded for Congress were 19 percent in 1979 and 18 percent in 1992, according to the report.
Gallup has conducted this nationwide poll since April 1974 – the year that Watergate came to a head – when 30 percent approved of the way Congress was handling its job.
“The reason why people have such a low opinion of politicians is because over the past few years we’ve lacked in this country a ‘Reaganesque’ vision of the future,” Darling said.
The poll lists President Bush’s approval rating at 37 percent, slightly higher than Congress’s, with 29 percent of those surveyed saying they were “satisfied” with the direction the nation is going.
In October 2002, before the last midterm elections, Congress had a 50 percent approval rating, down from a 63 percent peak earlier that year, according to the report.
In general, the lower the ratings are, the worse the incumbent party fares in elections.
Historically, this has been reflected in the average net change in U.S. House seats from one party to the other. In 1974, when approval ratings were below 40 percent, 29 seats in the House shifted parties, according to the report.
Conversely, in the three most recent midterm elections in which congressional approval ratings were more than 40 percent – 1986, 1998 and 2002 – the average change was only five seats, according to the report.
Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a liberal think-tank based in Washington, said in telephone interview that “the public is conflict-adverse and the Congress usually sends out signals of conflict more than consensus.
“The public doesn’t accept James Madison’s view of American government-that is, there are diverse views and people have to argue about them in office as a way of trying to reconcile differences.”
Mann noted that “Mark Twain said a long time ago ‘Congress is our only native criminal class.’ The public has always had a sort of skeptical view of Congress in general.” But “of course they tend to think much more kindly, absent any evidence of the contrary, of their own elected representatives.”
A separate Gallup poll from January supports this view, with 68 percent of saying they did not think their own member of Congress was corrupt but 38 percent saying that most members of Congress were corrupt.
Darling said that historically, approval ratings have been so low because “people distrust Washington.” He said the American people don’t like big government because “they send a very high percentage of their tax dollars to Washington, D.C., and don’t see it being spent very well. Therefore they don’t have a great love of Congress.”
In fact, he said, “they have a healthy distrust of Congress.”
Darling, a lawyer, also said, “I’m happy to hear that lawyers are held in higher regard than politicians.”
