By CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser
(CNN) — A new national poll indicates Americans are increasing giving a thumbs down to how their elected leaders are dealing with the fiscal fights two weeks into a government shutdown and days before a deadline to raise the debt ceiling.
The survey released Monday from ABC News/Washington Post, is similar to two polls out last week in suggesting congressional Republicans are getting more of the blame than Democrats or President Barack Obama for the fiscal impasse.
Seventy-four percent of people questioned in the ABC News/Washington Post survey from Wednesday through Sunday said they disapprove of the way congressional Republicans are handling budget negotiations. That’s up 11 percentage points from late September, just prior to when the shutdown took effect.
According to the poll, 61% of the public says it disapproves of how congressional Democrats are handling the talks, up 5 points. And 53% give the President a thumbs down, a slight increase of 3 points since late last month.
“Depending on which question and which poll you look at, either the Republicans have fallen further than the Democrats or both parties have lost the same amount of ground but the Republicans started in a worse position,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Either way, the shutdown appears to have put the GOP in a somewhat weaker position at this moment in time.”
The ABC News/Washington Post poll follows two other surveys released last week that indicated that no one was getting off scot-free, but that more fingers were being pointed at Republicans.
By a 22-point margin, more people in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey blamed the GOP in Congress rather than the White House for the partial shutdown. And only 24% approved of the job congressional Republicans were doing, 12 points lower than the approval rating for their Democratic counterparts.
And just 28% of those in a Gallup survey last week said they had a favorable opinion of the Republican party, down 10 points from a month earlier, and an all-time low in nearly 75 years of Gallup polling. The favorable rating for the Democratic Party slipped 4 points in the survey to 43%.
The ABC News/Washington Post poll indicates that independent voters are the most frustrated with Washington.
Fifty-eight percent of independents disapprove of how Obama’s dealing with the budget impasse. That number increases to 68% for congressional Democrats and to 76% for the GOP in Congress.
According to the survey, more than six in 10 self-identified Democrats approve of the job their members in Congress are doing, and more than seven in 10 approve Obama’s handling the situation.
But self-identified Republicans are split over how the GOP in Congress is doing when it comes to the fiscal fights.
The ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted October 9-13, with 1,005 adults nationwide questioned by telephone. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
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