In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, only 29% of people said they feel the country is generally going in the right direction, while 69% answered they feel the country is "pretty seriously off on the wrong track." Not much news there.

Interestingly, however, the Post followed this standard survey question with two other "right track/wrong track" questions, further probing public attitudes. When people were asked how things are going in their "state," 45% said things were going in the right direction while 52% said things were off on the wrong track. The results for a question about respondents' "local community" were even more pronounced: 58% said things were moving the right direction and only 41% said they were off on the wrong track.

That's close to a fifty percent swing between the how the public perceives things to be going at the national level versus the local level. We can speculate as to the reasons behind such a dramatic shift, but the implication seems clear: the more general the question about the direction of the country, the more likely people are to respond in a pessimistic way. At the local level, at least according to the Washington Post/ABC News poll, a decent majority of the public doesn't seem to think things are going too badly.

We find a similar dynamic with Congressional job approval ratings. When voters are asked to generically "rate the job Congress is doing," poll after poll shows public approval mired in the low thirties. But when voters are asked more specifically to rate the job their individual Congressman is doing, ratings are significantly higher.

You can see the potential implications of these numbers for a midterm election composed of 435 local races for the House of Representatives - many in districts gerrymandered to the incumbent's advantage. If the public is generally satisfied with the direction of things in their local community and also generally satisfied with the performance of their current Congressman, the odds of change become less likely.