Gee, I wonder why…
Via Sacramento Bee: More than two-thirds of Americans think the country is moving in the wrong direction, the highest in nearly four and a half years, a new McClatchy-Marist Poll found. Fully 68 percent of adults think the country is on the wrong track, while just 27 percent think things are moving in the right direction.
The last time such an overwhelming number of Americans had negative opinions of the country’s direction was November 2011, when 70 percent thought that America was going the wrong way.
The numbers are marginally worse when the poll narrows to registered voters, with 71 percent sour on the country’s path and 26 percent content.
The pessimistic view of the nation’s direction – which spans racial, gender, age and economic lines – comes despite signs of an improving economy. Employers added 215,000 positions last month and the unemployment rate was 5 percent. But that’s not enough to quell voters’ concerns.
“It’s the wages,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the survey. “It’s exactly the reason why so-called anti-establishment candidates are doing well. People aren’t looking at the overall economic, unemployment numbers. They’re not looking at the consecutive months of growth. They are feeling it in their own stagnant wages and a sense that we haven’t turned the corner in terms of the block they live on. That’s the frustration.”
Republican voters say by 89-10 percent that the country is heading the wrong way. Independents shared the downcast view of the nation’s course, 77-20 percent. Democratic voters are largely split – 49 percent thinking the nation is on the wrong track and 47 percent thinking it’s on the right path.
The numbers helps explain the rise of the insurgent campaigns of Republican Donald Trump and Democratic contender Bernie Sanders, presidential candidates who have tapped into voters’ anxiety about America’s standing economically and globally.
On the campaign trail, Trump relentlessly reinforces the wrong-track notion, saying America isn’t winning economically, in global trade or in foreign affairs.
Sanders, an independent socialist senator from Vermont, argues that the nation is on the wrong path because it’s failed to rein in Wall Street and provide a livable minimum wage to low-skilled workers. “People are looking for change, and we’ve seen the emergence on both the Democratic and Republican side of candidates who certainly are nonconventional in Trump and Sanders,” Miringoff said.
“I think it plays out in the fact that Clinton hasn’t been able to wrap this up; it plays out in that Jeb Bush never got started. The most establishment candidates either sputtered or never got out of the starting blocks.”
That frustration is shared by both ends of the income spectrum. Among registered voters with household incomes under $50,000, 66 percent think the nation is going in the wrong direction, while 27 percent say it’s on the right course.
In households earning more than $50,000, 70 percent said America was on the wrong track and 27 percent said things were going in the right direction.
Read the whole story here.
DCG
