A pair of new polls show the public's opinion of Congress is back in the cellar near where it began the year.
Despite what has happened with the economy, people seem to be in a reasonably good mood, according to an AP-GfK poll taken Oct. 1-5 in which 78 percent of the respondents said they were happy - 34 percent considering themselves "very happy" and 44 percent who say they're "somewhat happy."
And they like President Obama, whose approval rating for the way he's handling his job was 56 percent - about half of which came from people who strongly approved of his work as president.
Not so much for Congress, though, where the approval rating is 33 percent (just 3 percent saying they strongly approve), and the disapproval rating is 64 percent - more than half of whom say they strongly disapprove.
A Gallup poll taken about the same time showed a similar result, with 21 percent approving of the way Congress was doing its job and 72 percent disapproving - representing a 10 percentage point drop in approval over the last month.
The Gallup poll said much of the recent slide came from a drop since last month of 18 percentage point among Democrats who formerly had approved of the job performance of Congress.
When Gallup asked generically which party respondents would support for Congress in next year's election, 45 percent sided with the Republicans and 36 percent with the Democrats. When that same question was asked in July, the two parties were virtually tied - 42 percent for the Democrats and 43 percent for the Republicans.
Republicans, too, suffered a drop in job approval in the Gallup poll - of 4 percentage points which put them into single digits from 13 percent approval last month to 9 percent now.
The AP-GfK poll was based on telephone interviews with 1,003 adults nationwide and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The Gallup poll, taken Oct. 1-4, was based on telephone interviews with 1,013 adults nationwide and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
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