64% Say Fire The Bums

A sizable majority of Americans (64 percent) say the country would be better off by throwing “most” members of Congress out, a jump of 19 percentage points from two years ago. Only about one in five Americans (19 percent) feels the average representative deserves to be re-elected, a seven-point drop from October of 2007. Even half of Democrats take the view that we need to clean house and start over with new people.

But of course then we fall into the same old trap of everybody else's Congress critter is bad, but mine is okay.

This phenomenon of “hating” Congress but “loving” one’s congressman is an established trend in politics. However, even in this setting, more people opt for getting rid of their representative today (35 percent) than did two years ago (29 percent).

The numbers for both parties are over 50% when broken down by party, but even in this there is no good news for Republicans with the Dems getting a 53% disapproval rating compared to 59% for the Republicans.

Nevertheless, majorities disapprove of the performance of both Democrats (53 percent) and Republicans (59 percent).

Of course, I also chalk a lot of this up to the fact that a majority of Americans do not know who controls Congress and have in fact controlled it for over three years now.