69% of GOP Voters Say Republicans in Congress Out of Touch With The Party Base

Just 21% of GOP voters believe Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing their own party’s values, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Sixty-nine percent (69%) say congressional Republicans have lost touch with GOP voters throughout the nation. These findings are virtually unchanged from a survey just after Election Day.
Among all voters, 73% say Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the GOP base.
Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans say it is more important for the GOP to stand for what it believes in than for the party to work with President Obama. Twenty-two percent (22%) want their party to work with the President more.
Not surprisingly 72% of Democrats say it is more important for the Republican Party to work with Obama, but 54% of unaffiliated voters hold the opposite view.
“To be relevant in politics, you need either formal power or a lot of people willing to follow your lead. The governing Republicans in the nation’s capital have lost both on their continuing path to irrelevance,” Scott Rasmussen says in an analysis this week.
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Party officials and pundits have been debating for months what direction Republicans should take following Obama’s election and sizable Democratic gains in both houses of Congress. Some argue that the party should move in the direction of the Democrats on issues, while others say the GOP has been hurt by abandoning its core conservative economic and social positions.
The debate flared up again this week with longtime Republican Senator Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat out of fear he would lose his own party’s primary to a conservative challenger next year. Fifty-one percent (51%) of Republican voters say the Pennsylvania senator’s switch will have a significant impact on the laws passed by the Senate.
Voters for the first time since the election now say congressional Republicans are as partisan as their Democratic counterparts. Up till now, Democrats in Congress have been seen as governing in a more partisan fashion than Republicans. Fifty-five percent (55%) now expect politics in Washington, D.C., to be more partisan over the next year.
At the end of April, for just the second time in more than five years of tracking, Republicans led Democrats in the Generic Congressional Ballot. Forty-one percent (41%) said they would vote for their district’s Republican candidate while 38% would choose the Democrat.
In January, 56% of all voters said the Republican Party should return to the views and values of President Ronald Reagan to be successful. Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republican voters agreed.