Congressional Approval

Congressional approval stands at 10% in the monthly Gallup poll, just one point above it's record low. Congress has never fared well in the Gallup poll. But since 2007, it has fared even worse than usual. We only have good polling going back to roughly world war II, but we have plenty of anecdotal evidence from the 19th century that Congress was just as unpopular then. People will give you all sorts of reasons for why they dislike Congress, but in my view, it all reflects one underlying dynamic: people hate Congress because they hate losing. And you are going to do a whole lot of losing in U.S. politics. You can also replace "Congress" here with "politics." Largely because Congress is the public location of politics in the United States. The recent drop off of the 119th Congress---from 31% in March, 2025 to 10% now is a story of independents disappearing in 2025 (from 25% in March to 12% in December) and Republicans dropping significantly twice (from 54% to 23% between…