62% Would Vote to Replace Entire Congress
Congress just can’t win. Most voters still lack confidence even their own local representative and want to replace every single one of them.
No matter how bad things are, 63% of Likely Voters believe Congress can always find a way to make them worse. Only 20% disagree with this pessimistic assessment.
If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 62% would vote to dump all the current legislators and start over again. Just 15% would keep the existing Congress, while 23% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
It’s not just Congress in general that make voters skeptical. Just 32% of voters are even somewhat confident that their own representative in Congress is actually representing their best interests. Sixty-five percent (65%) don’t share that confidence.
Eighty-two percent (82%) of voters believe members of Congress should take a 25% pay cut until the federal budget is balanced.
“During the debt ceiling debacle, voters listened to members of Congress like they were the boy who cried wolf,” says Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports,. “While official Washington obsessed over the minute-by-minute silliness, voters expected all along that the debt ceiling would be raised without making significant spending cuts.” Forty-nine percent (49%) don’t even think the government will actually cut the spending agreed upon.
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The national telephone survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on July 30-31, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC .See methodology.
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