Talk shows last weekend abounded with Republicans directing amity and good cheer, sweetness and light, toward one another. It was a verbal love fest after a week of nonstop bloodletting within the House Republican Conference.
The happy talk masks a serious problem that goes well beyond 40-50 rebellious House members: Republicans in Congress have lost the confidence of their own party faithful.
{mosads}In a period of interparty animosity, when voters tend to like “their team” and disdain the opposition, only 34 percent of GOP voters approved of the way Republicans in Congress are handling their jobs, while a 53 percent majority disapproved of the congressional GOP’s performance in a late-September Huffington Post/YouGov poll.
A Quinnipiac University Poll in August found only 23 percent of Republicans approving of the way their party’s congressional wing was doing its job.
By contrast, a clear majority — 56 percent — of Democrats approve of the way their members of Congress are performing.
Dissatisfaction is not just institutional — it’s also personal.
Back in July, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was seen unfavorably by a 1-point plurality among Republicans, while Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was net unfavorable by 9 points among his fellow Republicans.
The anger is also specific, not generalized. Republican voters think their members of Congress are violating their promises, insufficiently conservative, too ready to compromise, and weak. In May, for example, only 37 percent of Republicans told Pew pollsters that Republican congressional leaders were keeping their campaign promises.
It wasn’t always that way. In April of 1995, 80 percent of Republicans thought their leaders were keeping their promises, and in April of 2011, it was 54 percent.
The decline has been precipitous — a drop of 43 points from 1995 and 17 points in just the past four years.
More striking, 75 percent of Republicans told Pew they thought the congressional wing of their party should challenge President Obama more often. Only 7 percent wanted them to go along with the president more often.
A 52 percent majority of Republicans thought Boehner “compromised too much with Democrats,” while a total of 21 percent thought he compromised the right amount or too rarely.
Similarly, 44 percent of Republicans thought their Speaker was not conservative enough, whereas 28 percent thought he was appropriately conservative or too much so.
Republicans also feel their leaders are weak. Fifty-six percent think John Boehner is weak, while 57 percent say the same about Mitch McConnell.
Now, these angry Republicans are not ripe for Democratic picking — given a choice between a Republican and a Democrat, 94 percent of Republicans would choose their co-partisan — but they are fueling the candidacies of Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina nationally, while threatening further Eric Cantor-like upsets in House and Senate races.
A majority of GOP primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally are now backing a presidential candidate who has never held elective office.
It’s somehow reassuring to believe we owe the increasingly acknowledged “ungovernability” of the House to the obstinance of a relative few GOP members. Unfortunately, the problem is far more deeply rooted.
Republican voters are not just angry, they are angry at their own members of Congress. They are angry at a leadership they believe has betrayed them by failing to stand up for the principles on which they were elected and instead caving into “political realities,” in the form of a Democratic president and powerful Senate Democrats.
The real problem, of course, is that while these angry Republicans constitute a significant bloc of the GOP, they represent a small minority of the electorate — a minority that is holding the country hostage to an extreme agenda, in part because interparty competition has declined to a point where most Republicans only have to worry about a primary challenge and not a general-election defeat.
Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has worked for Democratic candidates and causes since 1982. Current clients include the minority leader of the Senate and the Democratic whip in the House.