The abysmal approval rating of Congress

by Thomas G. McNeill, 4 October 2020

This post is part of a larger series. Full series in one document: Why vote for Thomas McNeill and the United Utah Party?

You may be asking yourself, “Why should I vote for Thomas McNeill and the United Utah Party?” To answer that question, I need to give you some background.

To begin, let me ask you another question — do you approve of the job that Congress is doing? If you answer “no” to that question, you are not alone. The approval rating for Congress has not exceeded 31% for over ten years. The high of 31% came this year in May of this year because there was a brief surge of approval as Congress was passing coronavirus relief measures, but in general approval of Congress hovers around 20%. In November of 2013 it was 9%.

Surprisingly, approval ratings for individual members of Congress are much higher. In some sense, this is not surprising — they win elections, after all. But why the big disconnect between approval for individual members of Congress and Congress as a whole?

Next: What has caused Congress’s approval rating to decline?