Time frames matter a lot – that’s a big lesson being taught by polling data on whether Americans are happy …Continue reading →
Time frames matter a lot – that’s a big lesson being taught by polling data on whether Americans are happy with where the country is going.
Although I haven’t posted on them here at RealityChek, these “Direction of Country” results obviously bear greatly on upcoming election prospects. More broadly, they say a lot about how optimistic or pessimistic Americans are about the country’s future.
Regarding the first observation above, the results we have – drawn from the RealClearPolling.com website’s polling average – provide some interesting perspective to say the last on the conventional wisdom that’s emerged from various nation-wide election results.
There’s no doubt that November 4 was a crappy night for Republicans, and for President Trump in particular. Even Mr. Trump acknowledged that, writing on his TruthSocial.com site that evening that “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT….” The President also recognized that public ire about the “affordability” of major daily or monthly expenses was a big reason for the various GOP setbacks.
So it looks like barring some major progress on inflation, all else equal, the outlook for Republicans in next year’s off-year Congressional and other elections looks pretty grim. But RealClearPolling’s Direction of Country data (below) seem to be saying “not so fast.”
The latest numbers do indeed appear discouraging for Trump-ers and Republicans generally. As of this morning, the share of respondents believing that the country is on the “wrong track” topped the share believing it’s on the “right track” by 21.7 percentage points. That’s way up from its latest low of the optimists being 6.7 percentage points underwater on June 6 – the best result from a Trump/Republican standpoint of the president’s second term.
But it’s considerably better than the 29.1 percentage point advantage enjoyed by “wrong track” answers on January 25 – the first result following the second Trump inauguration. It’s also miles better than the 58.1 percentage point gap recorded on July 11, 2022. That Biden era read was the worst since this data series began in early 2009.
In fact, the current Trump low point remains better than any Direction of Country result during the Biden administration after August, 2022. And of course, Biden’s Democratic party did much better than expected in the 2022 midterm elections. So at this point maybe these polling numbers are anything but disastrous for Republican incumbents?
The RealClearPolling data also push back against individual surveys suggesting that Americans are disturbingly downbeat about both the present and the future.
For example, this June Gallup sounding reported that Americans’ pride in the country had hit a post-2001 low. Last month, the Public Religion Research Institute released a survey showing that “Americans remain pessimistic about the country’s direction and the state of the country….” And earlier this month, an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that “Two-thirds of Americans say that the country is “pretty seriously off on the wrong track,” while just under a third say the country is moving in the right direction….”
Interestingly, in the ABC News etc sounding, the data over time make clear that since last November, the right track-wrong track has narrowed, to the point where it’s right about at its post-2010 average. Similarly, a separate Gallup report showed that “Americans’ Satisfaction With the Way Things Are Going in the U.S.” has rebounded some since January, though it’s down since May and on the low end of results going back to 1979.
But according to RealClearPolling – which takes the average of many surveys – the right track-wrong track gap nowadays is about average by post-2010 standards. Also revealing: The RealClearPolling chart also shows that overall, Americans are entirely prone to reply “wrong track” rather than “right track” in their answers to pollsters. In fact, these two different responses haven’t even been tied since June, 2009 – when the U.S. economy began recovering from the Great Recession. So even keeping these readings within this historic range might be enough to keep Washington’s current political power configurations pretty much where they are now.
.png)
