After a long campaign season culminating in an Election Day that brought big gains for the Republican Party, new results of a Rasmussen Reports telephone survey released Wednesday show that voters don’t expect Congress to accomplish much in the next two years.

Here’s how Rasmussen explained the findings (I’m not a paying member, so I can’t find all of the results of this latest survey):

Maybe the new Congress should just take the next couple years off because voters sure aren’t very hopeful about what they are likely to accomplish.

Likely U.S. Voters in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey were given a short list of issues that Congress will consider in the next couple of years and asked whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about what the legislators will accomplish in these areas. The answers reflect even deeper pessimism among voters than they expressed after the midterm elections in 2006. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Maybe that’s no surprise given the finding just after Election Day that 59% think it is at least somewhat likely most voters will be disappointed with Republicans in Congress before the next national elections in 2012, with 38% who say it is Very Likely.

Voters are gloomiest about immigration, with just 17% who are optimistic about what Congress will accomplish in the next couple years, down 10 points from the 2006 survey. Sixty-seven percent (67%) now are pessimistic. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure.

But then 62% of voters believe the current policies and practices of the federal government encourage people to enter the United States illegally.

The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on November 15-16, 2010 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.