In a post yesterday I noted that congressional job approval figures are at an all-time low: 11 percent. This observation drew comments from readers wondering who, exactly, holds the minority opinion and would tell a polling agency that they approve of Congress.

I often wonder things like this myself. Like for example, George W. Bush won re-election in 2004 with almost 51 percent of the popular vote. He left office with a 22 percent approval rating. I always wanted to ask that 29 percent what they had learned about Mr. Bush after 2004 that they did not know when they voted to re-elect him.

But I digress. I thought the “who are those people?” question was a really good one. Gail Collins joked in a recent column that maybe they misunderstood and thought they were being asked: “Do you approve of Christmas.”



I called our polling department to see if the could come up with a better answer.

The 11 percent figure came from a recent Gallup Poll. But our polling partner, CBS News, asked the question on their latest national poll and their results were very similar: 83 percent disapprove, 11 percent approve and 6 percent don’t know or just wouldn’t answer. Eleven percent of a polling sample is too small to draw finely detailed conclusions, but we do know some things.

First, people who approve of Congress are more than twice as likely to say they didn’t vote in 2008 as those who disapprove of Congress. That may be because they are younger. Three-quarters of those who say they approve of Congress are under 45. Less than half of those who disapprove are under 45.

The approvers are slightly more likely to live in the South. They are slightly more likely to be non-white, and to be evangelical. There is no difference in education levels, but the less affluent are slightly more likely to approve of Congress. There are no real gender differences, or party identification differences or differences in ideology. The approvers of Congress are not more or less likely to be Tea Party supporters than the disapprovers.

The approvers, however, are more likely not to be paying attention to the 2012 presidential campaign. And they are twice as likely to say they are not going to vote in primaries or caucuses.

And this may explain the phenomenon: younger people are just not paying attention and don’t plan to vote anyway. They just don’t have enough information to hate Congress as much as the rest of America. I don’t know about you, but I draw some comfort from that.

Oh, and there’s one more thing our polling folks told me. There is a phenomenon in polling that I’ll call “what my mother told me.” And that is people who just don’t want to be impolite. Sometimes, if you call back and ask them, they’ll tell you they don’t actually like Congress.

So, add the too-polite-to-trash-other-people crowd to the not-paying-attention and don’t-really-care and you can scrape together a huge 11 percent fan base for Congress. Throw in the margin of error and that’s just as likely to be single digits. Pretty pathetic showing. But we knew that already.