You don’t have to exactly be a serious news junkie to know that the country is in a churlish mood, at least about politics. A few recent poll questions by the Rasmussen organization illustrated this in ways that I found funny/sad/troubling/pitiful but not at all encouraging.
The one that first caught my eye asked who would be better able to address the nation’s problems, the current Congress or group of citizens whose names were drawn randomly from the phone book. Answer:
- Current Congress: 38 percent
- Random group: 43 percent
- Not sure: 19 percent
Turns out this was one among a series of alienation-testing questions Rasmussen has been asking for a few years. The others included (with responses from the poll taken in early February and the missing portion in each case given the “not sure” response):
Do members of Congress keep getting reelected because they do a good job of representing their constituents or because the election rules are rigged?
- Good job: 14 percent (yikes)
- Rules rigged: 59 percent
Who does the average congressman listen to most?
- Voters they represent: 10 percent
- Party leaders in Congress: 82 percent
And last, frankly the most alarming because it seems like such a fundamental rejection of a foundational belief about our system: Does the federal government have the consent of the governed?
- Yes: 21 percent
- No: 61 percent
I would love to see results for some of these questions going back a few decades, to test the notion that our parents and grandparents were less cynical (or do I mean less whiney?). Rasmussen has been asking some of them since 2008, and this set of answers does not suggest notably more alienation over recent years. (I also asked Scott Rasmussen how similar polls turned out in other developed democracies. But he had no comparative data from elsewhere.)
Rasmussen said that although he didn’t have poll responses on this set of questions going back before 2008, the election results show that at least since the 1990s, the public seems to be saying that they don’t trust either major party to address the nation’s problems. Each of the last three presidents (two Dems and a Repub) came into office with his party controlling Congress, only to see the public put the other party in charge. He called it a “fundamental rejection of both political parties” trustworthiness.
I asked Rasmussen whether the public bears any responsibility for causing some of the dissatisfaction, by not being politically involved or aware enough to elect representatives who will carry out its wishes or by sending perpetually mixed signals of what it wants done or by asking for irreconcilable actions (along the lines of balance the budget without raising taxes or cutting taxes or military spending).
“I reject that idea,” Rasmussen said.