“Ok, I’ve put on some weight, but that hippo must weigh a ton!”
Ethics Alarms readers know that certain statistics reporters and pundits like to cite are guaranteed to set my head spinning around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. One of them, that 50% of marriages end in divorce, is unethical because it’s imaginary. Another, the “women earn 75 cents for every dollar earned by men” line, is intentionally misleading as well as out of date. Lately, my head has been doing a 180 because of the popularity of citing Congress’s unpopularity, as measured by polls. In this case, the number is probably accurate and the implication of it is clear: the public doesn’t have much admiration for Congress. What is unethical is the misleading way it is typically used by journalists, to contrast with the President’s increasingly miserable poll numbers.
I do not know if this is more desperate Obama-advocacy by the people who are supposed to be reporting public opinion rather than manipulating it, or just ignorance. Either way, it is inexcusable, because it supports public misconceptions about the government and encourages confusion.
While all opinion polls are overused, a President’s approval rating and popularity is significant, because it has genuine governing implications. The President is the only official elected directly by the entire U.S. voting population. In a real sense, he represents the public. If a President is unpopular, he can’t influence public opinion, nor can he exercise as much influence over the legislature, which can afford to be openly defiant without fear of a public backlash. If Bill Clinton’s poll numbers were where Obama’s are now (or where Bush’s were when he left office), he would have probably been convicted in his impeachment trial.
Congress, in contrast, is not elected as a singular entity. If a member of Congress is popular in his or her district, it doesn’t matter if every voter there detests both the House and the Senate. Unlike the President, Congress almost never tops 50% in popularity, and is virtually always well below that of whoever is President. The difference is that Congress’s popularity has little meaning or consequence.
When journalists follow up the revelation that the President’s popularity has sunk below 40% with “but Congress’s popularity is also hitting new lows, at 13%,” they are trying to minimize the significance of the President’s falling support by use of a false comparison. It is like saying, “My son may be flunking out of school, but my dog can’t even read.” There is no popularity contest between the branches of government; it doesn’t matter who “wins.” (The Supreme Court, with positive regard from over 50% of the public, beats both of the other branches handily.) The President’s popularity is a measure of his ability to lead, while Congress doesn’t have to lead anybody.
Do journalists comprehend this, or are they misleading the public because they are confused themselves? I don’t know. Whether it is incompetent or intentionally misleading, contrasting Congress’s popularity with the President’s is a useless and simple-minded abuse of statistics.
Ethics Alarms 
The thing with Congress is that it’s built to be unlikable; people who support the minority party will dislike the majority-backed policies, people who support the majority party will dislike how the minority impedes the majority, and independents will just look aghast at the partisan bickering.
Sharp—I nearly wrote about this, but chickened out. Congress will always be unpopular with the minority party, so that cuts the positives to about 50%. Among that group are usually the moderates and the extremists, who don’t like each other and don’t like it when their side accommodates the other. That probably cuts the positives in half, to 25%….at best.
I once read an opinion that went like this (I wish I could claim it, or even attribute it, but I cannot remember where I read it): It is natural that Congress would be unpopular because, out of 535 legislators, only three of them our any good. The Representative from your district and the Senators from your state are all terrific legislators, bringing much needed federal cash to your district and state. All of the other congresspeople are terrible because they only want to direct wasteful pork to their own over-funded states and districts. Unfortunately, no-one ever gets to vote out these terrible legislators.
That’s literally true, however. The fact that Congress is unpopular may have no electoral consequences whatsoever.
A closer comparison would be the average of each member’s own constituent’s approval rating.
This: http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/growing-disapproval-of-congress/ is dated, but illustrates the difference.
It’s not incompetent, unfair or misleading to mention the Congressional approval rating. There’s no question that the President’s has more impact on governing, but one would legitimately wonder why the Congressional numbers aren’t mentioned in a news report, especially when the two are locked in policy battles (it may be irrelevant if they’re not). The addition of context is important, though. And no, you can’t assume that 50% of people disagree with the majority of Congress (or the President) at any given time because the electorate doesn’t ID itself strictly as partisan. In fact, some estimates show as much as 40 percent ID as independent.