by Glynn Wilson

More Americans trust President Barack Obama to influence the direction of the country than the Republicans in Congress. According to the latest Gallup poll on the subject, 46 percent of Americans say they want the president to have more influence over the direction the nation takes in the next year, while 42 percent said they would rather have the Republicans in Congress calling the shots.

U.S. preferences have been closely divided on this question since early 2011 after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. But President Obama has consistently had a slim advantage, suggesting a real lead for him, according to Gallup.

In general, Democrats want Obama to have more influence and Republicans want the Republicans in Congress to have more influence. Independents are more likely to prefer Obama.

Typically, Americans prefer that the president have more influence than the opposing party in Congress. However, that has not always been the case.

During the latter years of Bush’s presidency, when he suffered from low approval ratings, Americans wanted the Democrats in Congress to have more influence by roughly 2-to-1 margins. In the first year after Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in 1995, Americans generally wanted the GOP Congress to have more influence than President Clinton. But starting in about April 1996, Americans’ preferences shifted more toward Clinton, where they remained for the rest of his presidency.

The choice of who should have more influence may not be easy for Americans, since they hold neither President Obama or Congress in very high regard, although only 13 percent of Americans currently approve of Congress overall. That is tied for the second-lowest congressional approval rating Gallup has measured since it first asked the question in 1974.

Republicans (14 percent), Democrats (14 percent), and independents (11 percent) are about equally negative toward Congress.

Implications

“Given a choice, Americans are fairly evenly divided in their preferences for whether President Obama or the Republicans in Congress should have more influence over the course of the nation during the next year, with Obama having a slight edge,” Gallup concludes. “Obama’s slightly better positioning is consistent with the president’s usual advantage on this question, with Americans generally preferring the opposition party in Congress only when the president is highly unpopular. Obama is certainly not that popular at the moment, but on a relative basis he is more popular than the Republicans in Congress.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 5-8, 2012, with a random sample of 1,011 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or mini 4 percentage points.

Tags: Congress, Gallup Poll, President Obama, Republicans

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 9:16 am and is filed under GOP Politics, Politics and Government, President Barack Obama, Public Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.