"Poll: Approval Of Congress Lowest In Decade"

Greg Sargent (TPM Cafe):

Los Angeles Times poll: It finds that approval of Congress has sank to 27%, the lowest in a decade -- and even more tellingly, that less than one-third of liberals approve of the job Congress is doing.

The numbers would seem to suggest the possibility that the Dem leadership's decision to send President Bush a no-withdrawal-timelines Iraq funding bill may be further eroding public support for the new Dem Congress.

Yesterday, a feisty blogospheric debate erupted over the question of what impact Congress' Iraq policies are having on Congress' popularity. The argument was sparked by Stuart Rothenberg, who wrote a column arguing that Congressional Dems were playing the Iraq issue "like a Strativarius" by appealing to "swing voters." This prompted responses here and here arguing that this represented Beltway conventional wisdom at its worst.

Now we have these new numbers. Approval of Congress is at a meager 27%, down nine points from January, when the Dems took over. And less than a third -- 31% -- of liberals approve of the new Congress' performance, a precipitous drop from January, when 43% of liberals approved of it. (The 31% number is the same for moderates.)

A caveat: Approval of "Congress" as a whole -- as opposed to approval of Congressional Dems or of Congressional Republicans -- is not as fine-grained a number as we would like in gauging public support for Congress or for specific initiatives such as its Iraq policies. And other polls have shown Congressional approval dropping before Dems sent the final Iraq bill to the President. Nonetheless, the LA Times' pollsters themselves conclude that Iraq may be to blame for Congress' dip.

Indeed, it seems clear to us that if the Dems are playing Iraq "like a Stradivarius," as Rothenberg says, then the Stradivarius is badly out of tune.