Though Republicans won’t officially assume control of the House until this afternoon, a Rasmussen poll released yesterday finds that a large majority of Americans already believe most people will be disappointed with Congressional Republicans by the 2012 elections. What’s more, Republicans are already more unpopular now than they were immediately prior to the midterm elections.
In the new poll, 67% of respondents said it was likely that voters would grow dissatisfied with Republicans in Congress over the next two years, including 37% who said that was very likely. Only 25% of respondents said it wasn’t likely that voters would be dissatisfied with the GOP come 2012.
That finding comes just two months removed from the midterm wave that swept away 63 Democratic seats in the House. Further, the 67% of voters who expect to be dissatisfied with Congressional Republicans is also eight points higher than the 59% who felt the same way around Election Day, when a Republican takeover seemed inevitable.
So why the spike in expected dissatisfaction, despite the fact that the new Congress isn’t even underway yet?
A possible explanation comes from the same Rasmussen poll, which found that pluralities of voters believe spending and taxes will increase during the next Congress, while a majority believes that the deficit will also go up. That indicates that many voters might not actually believe that Republicans will make good on their midterm promises to preserve tax cuts for everyone while slashing government spending and trimming the deficit.
Forty-six percent of respondents said they expected government spending to rise in the next two years, versus 17% who thought it would go down, and 29% who thought they it stay the same. A near-majority of 49% of voters expect taxes to rise over the same period, while 9% expect them to go down, and 37% expect them to stay the same. As for the deficit, 64% expect it to grow during the 112th Congress, versus 12% who expect it to go down, and 21% who expect it to remain unchanged.
The silver lining for Republicans is that while they are largely expected to be unpopular in two years, even more people expect Democrats to be unpopular in a year when they’ll try to maintain control of the White House and Senate. In the same poll, a daunting 82% of respondents said they expected most Americans would have an dissatisfied with Democrats in Congress by 2012. Just 14% of respondents said they expected most voters would not be disappointed with Democrats by 2012.
The Rasmussen survey of 1,000 likely voters nationwide was conducted January 2. It has a margin of error of 3.0%.
