i feel warm inside knowing that a san francisco (w00t) democratic speaker's approval rating is 18 points higher than the president's.

It's telling that the Post started asking the question in 1994.  Seeking to bolster the Contract on America, perhaps?

This isn't the first poll in the new Congress that's had that result.  In early February (Feb. 8-11), a CBS poll showed "Congress" with 32-52 job approval/disapproval, but Congressional Dems with 54-35 approval-disapproval.  (Cong. GOP was 41-49.)

Around the same time, there were two polls that just asked about the parties and not about Congress generally.  A poll by Harris (Feb. 2-5) showed Cong. Dems with 41-52 a-d, and Cong. GOP with 26-69 a-d.  Another by USA Today/Gallup (Feb. 9-11) showed Cong. Dems at 41-50 and Cong. GOP at 33-59.  And one more poll, Pew (Feb. 7-11), asked just about Congressional Dems and got a 41-36 a-d.

(Links to polling data on Congressional Dems and Congressional Republicans.)

Meanwhile, approval ratings for Congress as a whole have been in the 30s and occasionally the low 40s.

So the Democrats should NOT, I repeat NOT, be bothered by Congress' mediocre polling.  People think much more highly of Congressional Dems than of Congress as a whole.

It's as if people knew there were two parties or something.

It's time to take advantage of this approval and write your Senators and Representative urging them not to back down to Bush on the supplementary funding bill.  The pundits are trying hard to paint this situation as a high risk for the democrats, appearing to not "support the troops."  My representative, Jason Altmire (PA-4) was surprised by the supportive correspondence he received as a result of his support for the timeline.  Let's face it, these people want to get re-elected, and it's incumbent upon us to show them where the majority stand.  The beltway monkeys sure won't report on it, because they are clueless as to the national political climate.

It's due to Nancy Pelosi standing up to Bush for the Democrats, and making it look like Democrats are taking over foreign policy-- that was a terrific move. One that the DC Democratic establishment would have bent over backwards in defeat when Bush tried to be the bully about it. Instead, she calmly told Bush to sit down and stop raging like a lunatic.

Great stuff! Good letter-writing fodder...this is why I donate to support your site. Now we need to move this information around the web and encourage people to bring it up with their reps.

On more than a few issues a number of Democratic members of Congress have appeared timid, almost as if they were still in the minority.

Maybe these numbers will give them more confidence in Reid and Pelosi.

'...all of the bluster of the Bush administration is just not buying any support for its Iraq policy, a fact that seriously calls into question the notion that the President would inherently win any showdown against the Democrats on the issue.'

What does 'win any showdown' mean in this context? It's not like there is going to be an election to get out of Iraq before '08. And the current Congressional GOP has shown itself to be far to the right of public sentiments. I can see Democrats winning a huge landslide in Nov. '08 in Congress and the Presidential election. But the object is to get out of Iraq sooner, not crush the GOP in '08. I'd like to do both but I'm not sure the strategies are the same for both. If you could keep the same numbers in Congress and end the US occupation in late '08 OR you could end the war in mid '09 and increase the Democratic membership in Congress by 5-10% what would you do? I'm not sure forcing a showdown on the Congressional GOP ends the war sooner, it may make them dig in at the very time they are open to change.

A 'showdown' with Bush requires A) crushing him with 2/3 of Congress or B) Bush being open to reason. Since I think B) is an virtual impossibility at this point then that leaves A) as an option. So the showdown isn't really a showdown  between a Democratic Congress and Bush, it's a race to convine members of the Congressional GOP to support legislation ending the US occupation of Iraq in the 110th Congress before the voters convince (most of) them in the Nov. '08 elections.

I know it's a good frame to polls showing 2/3 support for the Dems in Congress but in rhetoric there are strong frames, weak frames, and competing frames and people with strong pre-dispositions that aren't subject to much convincing through framing. The GOP base has strong pre-dispositions about Iraq. Public opinion  could run 80% against the Iraq War and I'm not sure they would change their mind. If people in the Senate GOP change their mind I believe it's going to be have to be a real change of conscience about Iraq. People like Snowe, Warner, Grassley and Specter are not easily subject to pressure in a showdown.

hip hip - hooray! hip hip - hooray!! huzzah!

I'm having trouble figuring out how to read all these different numbers. I've seen other news articles recently indicating that polls (most of them, I noticed, taken during the period after the first "nonbinding resolution" attempt but before the supplemental bill went up, when everything the Democrats proposed on Iraq went nowhere) were showing that the Democrats/Congress, though still high by some standards, had dropped quite significantly in approval since their soaring heights at beginning of the year.

So has the approval rating for the Democrats gone down, as those other stories indicated, or up, since the beginning of the year?

Were these polls measuring different things? Do different polls disagree?

Or were both polls right, and the polls showing the Congressional Dems going down in popularity were taken during the period of the unpopular "unbinding resolution" and internal party bickering, and the polls showing the Democrats going up to new heights were taken during the more public-opinion-friendly timetable bill period?

Please help me work this out, I'm confused.