Below The Beltway

Earlier this week, Rasmussen released a poll that seems to show that Congress has hit an historic low in it’s approval ratings:

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

So this should be bad news for incumbents, mostly Democrats, and good news for their Republican challengers, right ?

Not so fast.

We’ve seen this before many times. Back during the Reagan Administration the Democratic Congress consistently had lower approval ratings than the President and yet, notwithstanding six years of Republican control in the Senate that began when Reagan was elected and ended at his last mid-term election in 1986, incumbents were returned at a rate that mirrored the USSR’s Supreme Soviet and there was never any real change in the makeup of Congress.

The Republican “revolution” — which ended up being a revolution in name only — of 1994 was an historical anomaly and even then all but 34 of the incumbent Congressmen running for re-election won re-election.

There are, I think, two reasons for this.

First of all, while hating Congress is something of an American past-time, most Americans seem to enjoy the benefits that having an incumbent Congressman representing them brings to their district, even if those benefits are mostly an illusion.

Second, as Rick Moran points out, hating Congress has been something of an American tradition for centuries:

Public approval of Congress is so low that a few Republican optimists dream of overcoming the structural factors favoring the Democrats, holding steady or even gaining seats. They are dreaming. America has a proud tradition of disdain for Congress.

In the run up to the Civil War, the floor of the US House of Representatives became the very first battlefield as northern and southern members would routinely resort to fisticuffs in order to settle arguments or points of personal honor. It was not unusual for Members to come armed with pistols to the floor, ready and willing to offer satisfaction to those who maligned them.

And you thought our Congress was a mean place today?

(…)

[D]espite seeing Congressmen and Senators as well known personages, the American people back then saw Congress as a whole pretty much the way we see it today; a healthy republican skepticism for their motives and a tendency to view the entire crew as a pretty worthless bunch. They may have liked and admired their own Member of Congress and Senators. But taken together, the Congress was seen as a bunch of greedy charlatans who were out to enrich themselves and their cronies.

Moreover, as Moran also points out, any disdain that voters have for the Democratic leadership in Congress seems to be outweighed by the fact that they like GOP even less:

The aftertaste of 12 years of Republican rule is still being spit out by the voter which is why in the generic vote for Congress, Democrats still lead by a comfortable 47-34 margin. People may be going broke filling their tanks with gas but they aren’t yet ready to blame the party that promises them a bountiful and clean energy future but in the meantime they should sit down, shut up, and suffer in silence.

It shouldn’t be a winning strategy but it will be. And its because people don’t expect anything from Congress anyway that allows this kind of cynicism to win through to victory.

Which is why, in November, Democrats will not only hold on to their control of the House and Senate, but are likely to add to it substantially.