Bloodless Coup

Bro,
I looked at the pervasive weirdness that is the public's perception of our legislative branch (hate the Congress, love your Congressman), and even though the approval numbers for Congress have dipped down into the 20's, the approval ratings for each voter's own Congressman is still around 60%. So there isn't an anti-incumbent sense generalized throughout all branches of government.

[edit: fixed your link]

Well, okay - good to have that info - but has there been a relative shift? As my wording was meant to imply, it's not that I think there's going to be a huge throw 'em all out fit. But a general mood of unease could make it more likely that opponents would be in a stronger position to pick off the low-hanging fruit.

Well, if we compare the ratings now to the late summer of '02 when 53% approved of Congress and only 36% disapproved, approval ratings for their own Congressman were in the high sixties, barely above where they are now. So of the fourth or fifth of people who've gone from approving of Congress to disapproving of Congress, maybe a fourth or fifth of them appear to have held their own representative responsible. This gets interesting because the polls on people wanting Democrats to take over the Congress may not amount to much if people take the attitude to the polls that there's a problem, but not a problem with their representative. Alternatively, it could be that Democratic incumbents' numbers have gone up in a zero sum relationship with Republicans' losing numbers. Of course, there could be some other underlying political effect here that the polls aren't capturing because they disproportionately sample upper income Democrats and Republicans, and it's the attitude of large numbers of unsampled lower income Republicans that will hold sway, that would fit with how far off the polls were in the last Presidential election.