West Virginians are pretty pleased with their two U.S. senators, a new poll from a Washington-based politics and polling site has found.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin gets a nod of approval from 66 percent of registered voters in West Virginia, while Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito gets the approval of 59 percent, the poll from the website Morning Consult found.
Morning Consult polled voters in every state to find out what they think of their senators.
Manchin's approval rating makes him the eighth most popular senator in the country, among voters of his state.
Capito is the 19th most popular senator, out of the 100 nationwide.
Manchin's 66 percent approval rating is matched with 24 percent of voters who disapprove of his performance.
The same number, 24 percent, disapprove of Capito's performance.
Numbers released last week from the same poll gave Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin a 62 percent approval rating among West Virginia voters.
While Congress' approval rating are perpetually hovering just above the single districts, the new poll shows that voters don't hold nearly as dim a view of their own members of Congress.
The poll found that 69 out of 100 senators have approval ratings of 50 percent or higher, among voters in their own states.
One senator who's in the news an awful lot led the way. With an approval rating of 83 percent of Vermont voters, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who is running for president as a Democrat, is the most popular senator in the country, among his own voters.
Just as it did for Tomblin, the new poll found higher approval for West Virginia's politicians than another poll, released earlier this fall, did.
Manchin's 66 percent approval is nearly 20 points higher than the 47 percent of voters who approved of him in the MetroNews West Virginia Poll, released in September.
Capito's 59 percent approval is also an upgrade over the 53 percent who approved of her work in September.
The Morning Consult polls had more than 76,000 respondents in all 50 states and were conducted between May and November.
Sample sizes varied from 6,696 voters in California to 198 respondents in Wyoming.
In West Virginia, there were 619 respondents, yielding a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 points.
The median sample size was 1,172 respondents.
Capito, who was elected to the Senate in 2014 after 14 years in the U.S. House, is not up for re-election until 2020.
Manchin, who flirted with announcing a run for governor for more than a year, is up for re-election in the Senate in 2018.
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutmanon Twitter.