Steven Taylor notes today the well-known fact that 90 percent of House members are easily reelected but Congress as a whole has an approval rating only slightly higher than Ebola. But if people hate Congress so much, how is it that they seem to love their own representatives even more?
As I have observed before, it is profoundly problematic that Congress can have an approval rating of 12.9% (RCP average) and have that many noncompetitive House races. While approval ratings capture a lot of issues it is reasonable to posit that a significant part of the frustration with Congress is driven by the fact that many citizens find that their interests are not well represented in that body.
Taylor suggests that the main problem is that we have a lousy electoral system: “Single seat districts with plurality winners create poorly representative outcomes.” Maybe so. But I’m curious about something. I’ve seen hundreds of polls that track approval ratings for Congress, and they’re all uniformly terrible. But to the best of my recollection, I’ve never seen a poll that asks people why they disapprove of Congress. So consider this a bleg. Have I missed a good poll on this subject? Has anyone done a good study with lots of crosstabs that really dives into the question of why so many different groups all dislike Congress so much?