Bush Approval Up In Another Poll; Dems Still Favored For Congress

Another poll has registered a boost in President Bush's approval rating since his war-on-terror campaign blitz in the days surrounding the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll puts Bush's approval at 44%, the same level he reached in a USA Today/Gallup poll published earlier this week.

Bush's rating in the LA Times poll is his highest since January and three points higher than his rating in this poll in late June.

The poll of registered voters also showed that Democrats are favored by 10 points over Republicans as the party the electorate would like to see control Congress.

According to the Times, that puts the Democrats in a better position at this point in the game than were the Republicans just prior to the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994.

The 10-percentage-point Democratic lead on the question of which party voters intend to support for Congress is twice as large as the Republican advantage in the final Times survey before the 1994 election. Also, 46% of registered voters in the latest survey said their congressional representative deserved reelection, whereas 40% said they wanted to elect someone new - figures that seem to show a greater desire for change than polls found shortly before the 1994 vote.

Still, the numbers were not all bad for GOP lawmakers, according to the Times' summary of the poll.

On some issues where voters have preferred Democrats in past polls, however, the survey found Republicans narrowing the gap. Democrats still lead Republicans by 7 percentage points (44% to 37%) on the most sweeping question: Which party do Americans trust to handle the nation'ss major problems? But in the June poll, the Democratic advantage was twice as large.

A recent New York Times/CBS poll showed a more dramatic distaste for the Republican-controlled Congress. In that poll, Congress' approval rating is just 25%