Tracking Trump - Direction of the Country for September 22nd:
Bottom Line: This Friday feature is designed for political junkies. For years, despite generally favorable approval ratings for President Obama, we'd collectively been unhappy with the overall direction of our country. In the early months of the Trump Presidency we'd seen a bit of a shift with a less popular President but a bit more optimistic country generally. At one point earlier, this year we were nearly 20% more optimistic than under the Obama administration but that all changed about two months ago...
Here's where we stood on Inauguration Day:
Right Direction: 30%
Wrong Track: 59.1%
Net Negative: -29.1%
September 1st:
Right Direction: 25.5%
Wrong Track: 63.5%
Net Negative: -38%
And today:
Right Direction: 29.3%
Wrong Track: 60.3%
Net Negative: -31%
Change: -1.9% since Inauguration Day & +7% from three weeks ago
This is the first chance I've had to update this (generally weekly) series on our collective optimism since the start of the month. Like the President's approval rating, we've seen meaningful improvement over the past few weeks. That being said we're still slightly more pessimistic than we were at the end of the Obama era. It's notable that despite record stock prices, a 3% growth economy, a solid jobs market we're remaining this negative in our view of things. That can be explained in large part due to the two biggest of our concerns, healthcare and tax reform, not having been addressed/fixed. Could that be on the verge of changing?
Until next week...