It seems that the combination of brinkmanship and lukewarm reception to most anything President Obama proposes has caught up with Republicans in Congress.
The debt fight caused Washington’s approval ratings to drop to new lows, but new data from a Bloomberg national poll shows that it hit the Congressional GOP the strongest: of the Americans who said they were frustrated with Washington, 45 percent said it was because of the GOP.
President Obama got the blame only 20 percent of the time, nearly the same amount of of Congressional Democrats, who 19 percent said were to blame for the dissatisfaction.
The new poll comes as the Congressional Super Committee tries to come up with a way to reduce the deficit by 1.5 trillion dollars, which may show some of the same battle lines that were seen in the debt fight: a resistance on the part of the GOP to raise taxes, even though there is public support for hikes rather than cuts. In the same Bloomberg poll, 71 percent said the battle over raising the debt ceiling added to their frustration with Washington. So the message to Republicans seems to be: continue on this path at your own peril.
The Bloomberg poll used live interviews with 991 Americans conducted from September 9th to the 12th, and has a sampling error of 3.1 percent.
Kyle Leighton
Kyle Leighton is a News Writer at TPM. He graduated from Beloit College (WI) and began working in politics before getting an M.A. in magazine journalism from New York University, where he interned at TPM and the website of The New Yorker.