Stop Pretending that Polling on Congress as a Whole Means Something

Because “balance” is still the priority of cable news and our nation’s punditocracy, any mention of President Bush’s low approval numbers has to be accompanied by the claim that Congeress’s approval numbers are even lower.  I watch cable news all day for my job, and I hear it every day.

Somebody needs to call shenanigans.  Polling on an institution and then comparing the results to numbers from a poll on an individual politician is downright disingenuous.  Look at this page: poll numbers for Congress as an institution are always low.  If a poll asked voters to approve or disapprove of their district’s own Congressman or Congresswoman, aggregate results would look altogether different.

So let’s stop pretending like Americans’ disapproval of a room full of around 500 nameless politicians (maybe polls should ask if Americans even know how many members of Congress there are and how many they can name) is comparable to their disapproval of one very high-profile politician whom they have actually studied and paid attention to for the better part of eight years.  It’s apples and oranges, and in all of my cable newswatching, I haven’t heard a single pundit say this a single time.

Why won’t someone who is all over cable news say it?  Sure, Democrats don’t need to look like they’re making excuses, and it’s important to avoid that perception.  But an unaffiliated pundit with no plans to work closely with one candidate or another ever again has nothing to lose by pointing this out, and it needs to be said.  Here’s looking at you, Bob Shrum.