Who is the 14% supporting Congress?
Jed Babbin [1] says, it’s not as good for the Democrats as the 14% would seem to suggest.
Some of them must be people who are, um, a bit too busy to take pestiferous calls from pollsters. Like the mom who’s rushing out the door. It’s 3:02 pm, the kids are home for all of five minutes, changing into their sports gear and gathering up what they need for the school play rehearsal, most of which needs to be created from scratch by 3:05 pm. She’s bailing out the door, cramming them into the car with juice boxes, baseball helmets, soccer cleats and Frisbees. (Nobody is lucky enough to have all the kids playing the same sport the same year).
So mom answers the phone, thinking it’s her husband and wanting to tell him to pick something up for dinner, but it turns out to be some pollster who goes through a long spiel about how important the poll is. When he finally gets to the first question, Sally starts screaming about Jimmy throwing her Frisbee out the car window and mom passes her mood on to the pollster: “SURE CONGRESS IS DOING FREAKING GREAT. WHO CARES? G’BYE,” and slams down the phone to run after the flying disc, now about forty yards down the street. So let’s say two or three percent are people like mom. Add to that the teenagers who tell the pollster they’re of voting age just to be funny, and who think the word “congress” is boring unless used as an adjective attached to “sexual.” We must be up to five percent by now.
Some of the 14-percenters must be the Dems employees, relatives and friends. (Don’t forget, there are at least 30,000 Congressional staffers, and more than half are Dems.) Subtract from them all mothers-in-law, some pain in the butt brothers-in-law and rival siblings, and even that base can’t be very large. Ok, that brings us up to maybe six or eight percent. Then there’s the Dems’ most loyal constituency, the press.
… And so on. A good read. It’s also a read that goes directly to my point the other night, when I suggested that the only thing the Democrats had managed to do was to unify the country… against the Democrats in Congress… and give themselves a pay raise for doing it. No small feat, that.