Even the “own member” re-elect numbers are at all-time lows
by David Atkins
It’s an old truism that all politics is local, and that no matter how unhappy people may be with Congress at a national level they still want to re-elect their own Congressmember.
That’s not so true anymore:
Only 46 percent of people believe their own member of Congress deserves reelection — an all-time low in Gallup polling.
Last year, those who wanted their own member reelected stood at 59 percent, according to the poll released Friday.
That number has fallen from a record high of 69 percent in 1998.
The Gallup survey backs up a Pew poll that found much of the same sentiment last October.
Gallup also found only 17 percent of people think most members should be reelected, equally matching a record low. Historically, that number has averaged about 40 percent.Typically, people are more supportive of their own representative than Congress as a whole.
The breakdown is equal among Democrats and Republicans.
The anti-incumbent sentiment comes as dissatisfaction with government and disapproval of Congress has spiked heading into the 2014 elections.
I’ve said it again and again: voters are angry. They know things aren’t working, that the economy is terrible, that the middle class is getting screwed, and that government isn’t doing much to help. Democratic and Republican partisans blame different factors and people, of course, but everyone knows that something is terribly wrong. That’s why anodyne, Bloomberg-style centrism is a political loser, despite the rising numbers of voters who self-describe as independents. People are calling themselves independents because the two main political parties are suffering from the same loss of credibility as every other elite institution that is failing to address the slide of the American middle class.
That in turn means that politics are going to get even uglier and more volatile in coming years.
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