A new poll finds that a majority of Americans are fed up with Republican obduracy, which may portend a sea change in the upcoming congressional election.
A new CNN/ORC poll released Monday indicates Americans are disillusioned with GOP members after they precipitated the 16-day government shutdown in hopes of dismantling the Affordable Care Act. The poll reveals that three-quarters of Americans believe most congressional Republicans do not deserve to be re-elected.
The poll finds that a majority of Americans believe the Republicans' policies are too extreme. Currently, Democrats have an 8-point lead over the Republicans, an early indicator for congressional elections, which won't occur for over a year.
The majority of poll respondents blamed congressional GOP members for the shutdown, and said that President Obama was the big winner in the end, with Republicans hardly accepting any concessions in the deal to end the shutdown.
The survey also found that nearly 8 in 10 people believe the shutdown was bad for the country, and that the shutdown led to a decrease in confidence and satisfaction in government leaders. Seven in 10 believe that another shutdown is likely to occur.
"Although incumbent members of Congress of both parties are not very popular, the shutdown seems to have only affected views of GOP incumbents," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
Seventy-five percent of people questioned said that most congressional Republicans don't deserve to be re-elected, which is 21 percentage points higher than the 54 percent who say that most Democrats should not be re-elected.
Fifty percent of registered voters in the survey said that they would vote for the Democrat in their district, and 42 said they would vote Republican. The 8-point Democratic margin in the CNN poll is the same as a recent NBC News/Wall Street survey.
"We're a long way away from saying that the Democrats have a chance to regain control of the House," Holland cautioned. "There is more than a year to go before any votes are actually cast and the 'generic ballot' question is not necessarily a good predictor of the actual outcome of 435 separate elections. A year before the 2010 midterms, for example, the Democrats held a 6-point lead on the generic ballot."
The Republicans won back control of the House in 2010, with a landmark 63-seat gain.
A major concern for Republicans is that a large portion of Americans--56 percent-- believe that the Republican party is too extreme.
"Any connection with the tea party movement isn't helping the GOP," Holland added. "Six in 10 Americans now believe that the tea party movement is too extreme; only one in four consider it to be generally mainstream."
Forty-nine percent also believe that Republicans should give up more than the Democrats in a future bipartisan deal, but 44 percent would prefer to see the opposite, with Democrats conceding to the GOP.
According to USA Today, the poll also revealed that more than 6 in 10 Americans believe that House Speaker John Boehner should be replaced as the leader in the House of Representative, with 63 percent of adults saying that Bohener, R-Ohio, should no longer serve as speaker, in comparison to 30 percent who say he should keep his powerful post.
Last week, Boehner was forced to agree to a deal to reopen the government to avert a possible default. Although the bill passed, 144 Republicans rejected the Senate's bipartisan plan to fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt ceiling through Feb 7.
The poll was conducted from Oct. 18-20, with 841 adults nationwide questioned by telephone. The margin of error is +/- 3.5 percentage points.
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