Voters Continue To Believe Congress Can Always Make Things Worse
Despite the change of control in the House, voters continue to believe Congress can screw things up worse than they already are.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 60% of Likely Voters say no matter how bad things are, Congress can always find a way to make them worse. Only 23% disagree with this assessment, while another 16% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
In early September, just before the mid-term elections, 62% of voters felt this way about Congress.
Although Republicans now have the majority in the House, 61% of GOP voters believe Congress can always make things worse. This view is shared by 54% of Democrats and 67% of voters not affiliated with either political party.
As Scott Rasmussen notes in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.” So perhaps it’s no surprise that there is little partisan disagreement on this question.
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The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on January 7-8, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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