John Boehner said 2012 will be a 'referendum' on the president’s economic policies. Polls show toll on House GOP image

House Republican poll ratings have plunged over the past year, as Washington’s brutal battles have taken a toll on a party that was flying high last January when it took the majority.

Long, drawn-out skirmishes over the debt ceiling, the supercommittee and the payroll tax holiday have led to a 64 percent unfavorable rating for Republicans, with their favorable numbers sitting at 29 percent, according to an internal poll conducted by GOP pollster David Winston in the final days of December 2011.


To illustrate how precipitous a drop that is, Republicans started off 2011 with a 43 percent favorable rating and 46 percent unfavorable rating.

At the same time, President Barack Obama continues to gain ground on congressional Republicans on a central issue: jobs and growing the economy. When asked who is more focused on those two objectives, 49 percent of those polled believe it’s Obama, while 40 percent say it’s Republicans in Congress. It’s the fifth straight month Obama was ahead of Republicans in Congress — Republicans led Obama in early August.

Republicans say the dip in poll numbers is because the party slipped up on its jobs message. Democrats, by contrast, have 38 percent favorable ratings, and 57 percent unfavorable numbers — a slight improvement from November.

The political pain is going to keep on coming for Democrats and Republicans: Obama has said that he’s going to legislatively bypass — and campaign against — Republicans on Capitol Hill. And Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said the 2012 election will be a “referendum on the president’s policies regarding our economy.”

The poll, which was conducted on Dec. 28-29, is the first comprehensive look at where congressional Republicans stand in the eyes of the public. There are a bevy of caveats: Republicans in Congress don’t run against the president but their Democratic opponents. And the poll was taken at the height of discontent with Republicans — and Washington overall.

This poll’s results were the subject of a session during the House Republican retreat earlier this month in Baltimore.

For 2012, Republicans are going to try to rewrite the script.

Gone are the days of legislative warring with Obama: Republicans say they simply want to talk about job creation and present the public with alternatives to the president’s agenda. They’ll be tested on several fronts, including whether the House Republican Conference is willing to go along with a path of nonresistance on the payroll tax cut, which is set to expire at the end of February.

The fact that the poll comes from Winston, a longtime Republican pollster, makes it that much more difficult for the House GOP to ignore. Winston has been around since the heady days of the first Republican revolution and now is a trusted adviser of Boehner’s and works with Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.

Boehner addressed Winston’s polling at the GOP retreat earlier this month. On the last day of the retreat, he told the closed-door meeting of Republicans that the pollster said “too many Americans right now don’t know we have a plan for jobs. You also heard [Winston] say that just a few months ago, we were making real progress.”

“In September and October, while our presidential candidates were talking about everything but jobs, House Republicans were driving a jobs message — and it broke through,” Boehner told the conference, according to someone present. “We were passing jobs bills on the floor. … And by the end of October, 50 percent of Americans said they knew Republicans had a plan — putting us back at parity with Barack Obama on jobs.

“We lost our momentum in November and December with the supercommittee and payroll tax fight,” Boehner continued. “… The Keystone pipeline — which is part of our jobs plan — has put us back on offense. This is an opportunity to get back to what we know works. … You’ll see me holding up my jobs card, talking about our plan, asking ‘Where are the jobs — ?’ Have you heard me say all that before? Hell, yes. I’ll be doing it again because it works. And it only works if we do it over and over and over again.”

There were some bright spots for Republicans. Seventy-eight percent of those polled believe that the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been stalled by the administration, would create a “significant amount of jobs,” although voters remain essentially split over whether Obama was right to delay its construction. Republicans remain more trusted than Democrats on handling the economy, jobs and energy and gas prices. The poll also shows that the economy is a major issue to voters.

Republicans say their sinking poll numbers are not indicative of a battered party but rather of straying from their jobcentric message. It’s an argument that appears to be borne out by some of the poll’s results.

For example, in early October, 32 percent of those polled by the Winston Group had a favorable opinion of Republicans. That jumped to 40 percent later in the month: Republicans say that’s because of an uptick in jobs rhetoric. When Republicans started battling Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House — and lost their jobs message — the favorable number dropped to 37 in November and 29 percent in December. The poll had a 3.1-percentage-point margin of error.

Along the same lines, Republicans’ unfavorable numbers dipped in October from 59 percent to 53 percent, but rose in November to 57 percent, and in December to 64 percent.