Congress is the most popular it's been since 2009


Congress is enjoying a spike in popularity in the early days of the Trump administration, a new Gallup survey finds, hitting its highest national approval rating — 28 percent — since 2009. January's one-month increase of 9 percent approval is also the largest single-month growth in the last eight years.
Predictably, the Republican-controlled Congress is most popular among Republicans, 50 percent of whom say they approve of the job Congress is currently doing. Still, independents are feeling 8 percent more positive about Congress than they did a month ago, while Democrats feel 8 percent less positive, expressing just 11 percent approval.
The 29 percent overall approval rate almost matches Gallup's historical average of 30 percent.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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