GOP Voters More Aligned With Trump Than Congress

 
Rasmussen Reports-
Most voters share the views of the president and the party coming to power, but Republicans identify a lot more with Donald Trump than with the GOP Congress.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 53% of all Likely U.S. Voters identify with the GOP team: 37% feel Trump's views are closest to their own when it comes to the major issues facing the country, while another 16% feel most closely in sync with the average Republican member of Congress. Thirty-seven percent (37%) say the views of the average Democratic member of Congress are closest to their own. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Among Republicans, however, 63% say that Trump’s views are closest to their own when it comes to the major issues, while only 27% say that of the views of the average Republican member of Congress. Among Democrats, 72% identify with the average Congress member from their party, while just 16% think Trump's views are closest to theirs.

Just a month before Election Day, 51% of GOP voters still felt that their party's leaders didn't want Trump to be president, although that was down from 66% four months earlier.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on January 3-4, 2017 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
 
More than half of all voters feel comfortable with the prospect of one party controlling both the Executive and Legislative branches of government, as Republicans will do when Trump enters the White House on January 20.

Among voters not affiliated with either major political party, 34% say their views most closely match Trump’s, while 16% are more aligned with the average GOP representative. Only 29% feel closer to the average Democrat in Congress, but 20% of these voters are undecided.

The Republican team of Trump and Congress earn majority support in most demographic categories, but the president-elect is the one voters are most likely to agree with.

Women, middle-aged voters and blacks lean more heavily than the others in the direction of the average Democrat in Congress.

Among voters who Strongly Disapprove of the job President Obama is doing, 76% say Trump's views are closest to their own, compared to only 18% who say the same of the average GOP member of Congress.

Voters aren’t sure if the new Congress will be an improvement on the last one, but most want Congress to cooperate with Trump as much as possible.  Fifty-four percent (54%) think major legislation to improve the country is likely to be passed during Trump’s first 100 days in office.

But only 48% of voters are confident that Trump and Congress will work together to do what's best for the American people.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has gone from publicly criticizing Trump when he was the GOP's presidential nominee to enthusiastically embracing him as president-elect. Following the election, Ryan is much more popular with his fellow Republicans and is better liked by all voters than any other congressional leader of either major party.
 
Last August, 47% of GOP voters sad their party should be more like Trump than Ryan. Thirty-six percent (36%) felt it should be more like Ryan.

Seventy-six percent (76%) of GOP voters told Rasmussen Reports last March that Republicans in Congress have lost touch with their party’s base. That's consistent with Republican voter attitudes for years but was the highest finding since we first asked this question just after Election Day in November 2008.  Democrats have always been much more enthusiastic about their congressional representatives.