High esteem for the military, rock bottom for Congress
Once again, America’s military is the preeminent US institution in the hearts and minds of the American people. That is no surprise. The surprise is how low Congress has fallen. Gallup has a poll that once again shows the military to be the most respected profession or institution in the United States, with 71% of Americans saying they have a high level of confidence in that group, as opposed to 26% in the Presidency and a startlingly low 12% having such confidence in Congress:
When we looked at these statistics a while back, confidence in the Presidency was much higher at 44%, and that figure has now fallen by over a third to 26%. Congress, at that time controlled by the GOP, was also held in low esteem in the previous poll, with a 22% rating. Now that has fallen almost in half. Congress now gets a mere 12% confidence rating, the largest percentage decline among all institutions.
12% confidence in Congress is a very disturbing statistic. Congress and news about Congress are omnipresent in daily life and the leaders of congress are staples of network news. It would not have been terribly surprising to see Congress’s decline mirroring that of TV news, which fell from the high 20s to the low 20s in the surveys — but confidence in Congress plummeted by twice as much. No doubt Democrats and Republicans will have different spins to attach to the institutional decline of Congress. Our question is this: how much additional power would you want to see in the hands of an institution that is held in low esteem by 80-90% of the American people?