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James Joyner notes that the public opinion numbers on Congress have reverted back to their long-term average of 28% approval after a brief “100-hours” honeymoon where “approve” only trailed “disapprove” by a mere 18 points.
What may be more interesting is the dropoff among Democrats; their approval of Congress is already almost down to the last year’s lows among Republicans. I have a good hypothesis as to why that might be the case (my guess is that Republican identifiers tend to have lower expectations of Congress, and therefore rate it more highly than Democrats, when you control for who’s in the majority party), but no real time to spend on the analysis to demonstrate it, or for that matter the journal search to find out if it's already been done.
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1 comment:
That’s interesting, and I think your hypothesis is plausible.
Respondents who self-identify as Democrats might have had very high expectatoins about what a new Democratic congress would be able to do, and hence would have become disillusioned pretty fast.
But a good test of the “partisan lens” component of your hypothesis would be whether self-identified Republicans exhibited a similar dropoff in 1995. I would think that, while generally, Democratts might have higher expectations for Congress, that the partisan factor is at cross-purposes with the impact of changes in the party in control. In other words, Republians had pretty high expectations in 1994–5 and soon had pretty strong reasons to be disillusioned, and thus would look more like today’s Dems than “normal times” Reps.