My bad!

I trust pollster more. They do an excellent job of vetting the data used. They also use a very good regression method to determine the average and put it all in a table.

I don't see a table but I've gone to the site and looked at Charles Franklin's article. He acknowledges that the LAT/Bloomberg poll is excellent and this is indeed the lowest Congressional approval in the last ten years of that poll, that approval is trending down, and that it's around 30%.

His point is really just a quibble: Aggregating all polls, this isn't the lowest point.

Then again, I never said it was, merely that it had dropped to 27% in the linked poll. Which, of course, it had.

Drop in congressional approval? What drop?

According to pollster.com their approval has only risen since the elections.

Look at the RealClear Politics data going back through last March. There was a significant uptick after the election and when the new Congress came into office. The numbers are now down below the pre-election low.

Mark Tapscott thinks the combination of historically low poll numbers for President Bush and the drop in Congressional job approval to a mere 27% may signal that the public is finally fed up with “business as usual.”

Drop in congressional approval? What drop?

According to pollster.com their approval has only risen since the elections.

http://www.pollster.com/ACongApprovalCurrent380.png

I submit that the amount of anger coming from the electorate is directly related to how leftist the current power structure is. If you track the polling data , versus the positions taken by the politicians and power regardless of party, you'll notice that the further left they lean, the angrier the electorate gets. A quick look at Harry Reid's numbers... what, 19%? are a clue to this.

The solution, is not a third party. The solution is to get republicans to start acting like republicans.

Look, even France, after so many years of socialism, is swinging to the right. We could do the same thing if we actually had politicians who stood up for those values. It's my judgment that the American people in majority long to do precisely that. What needs to happen is that the republican party needs to swing to the right, and unload the republicans in name them only like McCain and so on.

I'm not Panglossian by any stretch, but why should anyone expect that a fresh coat of paint, a rebranding, or a new manifesto will suddenly give us a different result when thrown into the same briar patch of domestic politics, international intrigue, economic populism, nascent isolationism, and technological change advancing faster than society can cope? The forces arrayed against idealism (any idealism) are damned strong and wickedly resilient. The problems rest with the people. It is the people who keep electing folks like Trent Lott and Harry Reid. Any real, lasting solution must address the deficiencies in the choices exercized by the electorate or else we'll just keep seeing snippets of a song by The Who over and over and over. And since I'm stuck once again on cliches, Lord Acton nailed the real problem long ago in his oft-quoted aphorism about power, which, as usually interpreted, is really a corollary to Thomas Paine's statement concerning the inverse relationship between the quality and the quantity of government.

But I digress.

I don't doubt that we'll get a new political party, but I don't think it's going to get a new name.

An existential question, really, but that's about right. The parties seldom reinvent themselves in one cycle but they certainly evolve into something unrecognizable over time.