Tracking Trump - Direction of the Country for February 2nd:
Bottom Line: For years, despite generally favorable approval ratings for President Obama, we'd collectively been unhappy with the overall direction of our country. In the first year of the Trump Presidency we saw the scenario reversed (with a more optimistic country but lower approval of President Trump).
Where we stood on Inauguration Day:
- Right Direction: 30%
- Wrong Track: 59%
- Net: -29%
Last Week:
- Right Direction: 35%
- Wrong Track: 55%
- Net: -20%
And Today:
- Right Direction: 38%
- Wrong Track: 54%
- Net: -16%
Change: +13% under Trump & +4% from last week
Over the past week Americans had the ability to weigh President Trump's Davos trip (which went well), The GDP report which showed the biggest increase in personal disposable income in over twenty years, the State of the Union speech (which is barely factored into these numbers yet - under 10% of the samples), the best January for stocks since 1987 and potentially the earliest impact of tax reform for those who may have started to see the impact in their checks. That's a lot of potential positive momentum and it's not surprising to see that we had a 4% bounce in our optimism this week. We're now back to the highest optimism level since April of last year and there's a fair amount of runway for these numbers to potentially trend higher from here.
On another note...For months in the weekly look at President Trump's approval rating I've broken out the difference in Trump's approval rating based on the level of political engagement. Simply put, the more engaged someone is the higher the President's approval rating. We're also seeing that show up in the direction of the country questions. Consider...
On the question of whether the country is heading in the right direction...
- With adult only samples: 35%
- With Registered voters: 39%
- With Likely voters: 39%
What's next? The FBI FISA memo? The looming February 8th deadline? DACA/Immigration reform deadline in March? Until next week...