With all you’ve been reading about Americans losing faith in institutions, and about angry citizens accosting members of Congress, this has to be one of the more interesting poll results you’ve seen this month.
The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has the public approval rating of Congress at 29 percent, with 60 percent disapproving. That might not sound great, but this is the highest approval rating and the lowest disapproval that any Congress has gotten since 2009 in this poll.
There is one quirk: Unfortunately, the NBC/WSJ poll hasn’t asked this particular question since 2015, so there isn’t a clear trail of results from before the 2016 election. Yet if you look at all the other polling on this subject by all companies, it is still true. This result, which resembles that of another recent poll by Gallup, represents the highest job approval and lowest disapproval the Congress has received in any poll by any company since February 2011, when a single poll (by Fox) showed a 31/60 split.
You have to go back about 12 years to find the last time Americans approved of the net job Congress was doing.
The thing about the generic congressional approval rating (as opposed to one party in Congress or the other) is that it isn’t necessarily predictive of election results the way you’d expect — or at least, it hasn’t been in the last few election cycles. But as a barometer of whether the institution of Congress is respected, it is a very surprising result at a time when the president’s rating (according to the same poll) is historically low.
