Tracking Trump - Direction of the Country 5-26-17:
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're seeing a bit of a shift with a less popular President but a bit more optimistic country generally.
In this entry I'll be tracking the overall view of the direction of the country led by President Trump.
Here's where we stood on Inauguration Day:
- Right Direction: 30%
- Wrong Track: 59.1%
- Net Negative: -29.1%
Last week's ratings:
- Right Direction: 31.7%
- Wrong Track: 57.7%
- Net Negative: -26%
And today:
- Right Direction: 27.5%
- Wrong Track: 58%
- Net Negative: -30.5%
Change: -1.4% since Inauguration Day & - 4.5% from a week ago.
So this week marks a first of the young Trump era. It's the first time our country has been less optimistic under the Trump administration. Despite having had consistently lower personal approval ratings than Obama, President Trump's initial wave of higher optimism with businesses that carried over to consumer sentiment along with substantially higher stock prices led us to be the most optimistic we'd collectively as a country in well over four years. That was just a month and a half ago. Today we're about 20% less optimistic. It's pretty simple really. Stocks prices are still high. Regulations for businesses have started to be reigned in but the focus isn't on more affordable healthcare and lower taxes. It's on a bunch of drama. Much of it is outrageous conduct by the President's political opposition and their willing friends in the Godless, soulless, slanderous media but the President hasn't helped his cause by staying on message and staying focused on passing the agenda. If the conversation shifts back to what Americans actually care about rather than political drama this could quickly begin to turn into optimism again. But that's a big if...