On Congressional Approval in the Washington Post/ABC News Poll

The poll's write-up can be found here.

Let's start by putting some job performance numbers together:

Topic	Approve	disapprove	Net
Obama	43	55	-12
Congressional Democrats	34	64	-30
Congressional Republicans	24	73	-49

One more. The question: "Overall, who do you trust to do a better job coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years - (Obama) or (the Republicans in Congress)?" Obama and the Congressional Republicans tie at 41%.

How does this happen? Democrats approve of Obama, 76-21%. They approve of Congressional Democrats, 61-36%. But Republicans disapprove of Congressional Republicans more than approve; the approve-disapprove breakdown is 43-53%.

Clearly, Democrats as a whole are relatively happy with the tactics and substance of their political leaders. Republicans are not in theirs, albeit not uniformly. We can read tea-leaves to figure which directions the unhappy Republicans think the fix should come on the left-right continuum. In the Obama approval question, 13% of Republicans approve of Obama's performance.

While not definitive, combined with the 53% who disapprove of Congressional Republicans' performance, it appears as if there are significantly more Republicans who want their elected leaders to be more effective in opposition and/or move further to the right than want them to be less opposing/move further to the left. [Updated to add: The ratio there is approximately 4-1. As it happens, on the "who do you trust to..." question, there are 4 times as many GOPers who say "Congressional Republicans" that do not.]

Boehner and other Republican leadership may have been trying to get conservative groups to chill on their attacks on the GOP, and to get the infighting to stop. Or, perhaps they were deciding to engage in some infighting of their own. If the latter is the case, they may want to reflect on the wisdom of moving against a clear majority of their voters. If the former is, it is a worthy goal. They may want to re-evaluate the approach they took, because it did not work.

If the wave they want is to form, they are going to need to solve the puzzle on how to satisfy their party's right while losing less of their left. Despite the 4-1 ratio I mentioned above, that they are already losing 13% in the Obama approval question tells me that simply moving right won't do the trick (and moving left certainly won't). I suspect the answer is for both main factions within the GOP coalition to swallow their grumblings and start selling the GOP "brand" as a whole. This is not the time for a GOP internal war, as is currently being fought. When it comes to infighting for the GOP, the Wargames finale holds wisdom: the only way to win is to not play that game.