A Rasmussen poll released on Thursday found that just weeks before the midterm elections, more than one-third of Americans likely to vote in 2014 don’t know which party controls the House and Senate.
For months political analysts have been anxiously trying to predict if the country’s dissatisfaction with President Obama’s policies will be enough to hand control of the Senate to Republicans, but it seems that that voters with little background in current events will be playing a larger than anticipated role in election results.
Rasmussen reported that its latest telephone survey found that only 63 percent of respondents knew that Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. An identical number knew that Democrats controlled the Senate.
Meanwhile, 20 percent of respondents mistakenly thought that the Democrats controlled the House and 17 percent were unsure which party controlled the legislature. The survey found that 18 percent thought that the GOP controlled the Senate, while 19 percent were unsure.
“This is even less awareness than voters expressed in March of last year,” Rasmussen noted. “[T]hese are respondents who are the likeliest to vote this November and so presumably are more politically aware than most other Americans.”
The pollsters found that women and those under age 40 were less likely to know which party controlled Congress, while Republicans were more aware than Democrats and unaffiliated voters.
With less than two months to go before the election, these are not encouraging numbers for Republican candidates wishing to pin voter dissatisfaction to the policies of Obama and Congressional Democrats.
