A recent Gallup poll reveals that just 21% of Americans are happy with the job Congress is doing, while 76% of those surveyed said they disapprove.
The latest approval rating was taken at the beginning of March, before the Senate Judiciary Committee began confirmation hearings for President Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
After enjoying a slight bump to 31% after the passage of several pieces of pandemic economic legislation, Congress' job approval rating is now in the 18% to 23% range seen since October, Gallup said. The current rating is down considerably, however, from the 12-year high of 36% recorded in March 2021.
With gas prices soaring and inflation at a 40-year high, many Americans are just scraping by, trying to make ends meet with increasingly less. Though the party in power typically loses a significant number of House seats in the first midterm elections of a president's term, many analysts are predicting that voters will give Democrats a shellacking in November over the current state of the country. If the question is, "Are you better off now than you were two years ago?" in many cases, the answer is a resounding, "No."
Gallup noted that most of the decline in congressional approval since Biden took office has been due to a decline in support from Democrats.
Democrats' approval of Congress rose 50 percentage points to 61%, according to Gallup, between December 2020 and February 2021. During this time, the Democratic Party won a majority in both the House and the Senate for the first time in more than 10 years, and Biden was inaugurated as president.
Attributing to the drop to delays in advancing Democrat agenda items such as infrastructure, social spending, and voting legislation, Gallup reports that Democrats' approval fell to 38% by June 2021 and then to 26% at the beginning of 2022.
Since the start of the year, congressional approval among Democrats has somewhat rebounded to 35%.
Since February 2021, the 35-point range in Democrats' approval of Congress' job performance contrasts with an 18-point range among Independents and an eight-point range among Republicans.
Independents' approval has gone down over the past year, while Republicans' has remained consistently low.
According to Rasmussen Reports' Generic Congressional Ballot, Republicans currently have an 11-point lead in their bid to recapture Congress.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found that, if the elections were held today, 50% of likely voters would vote for the Republican candidate, while 39% would vote for the Democrat.
The Gallup poll was conducted via phone March 1-18 with a random sample of 1,017 adults living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of error is plus or minus four percentage points.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.