Several new polls include a version of the familiar right-way/wrong-way poll question. Like the Archive of the Roper Center According to surveys, pollsters have been asking this question since at least 1971, when the Opinion Research Corporation found that 29% thought things in the country were “generally going in the right direction” and 63% thought things had “gone very seriously wrong.”
Since then, the question has been asked many times. There have been only a few times when Americans told pollsters that the country was on the right track. In 1984-85, during the Reagan presidency, when Americans finally felt things were getting better after stagflation and a painful recession, the response to the right direction outweighed the wrong direction. Before the turn of the century, when people felt good about the Clinton economy and balanced budget, he did it once again. Answers to the right track exceeded the wrong track for a while after 9/11. Neither of these periods of optimism lasted long.
Questions from AP-NORC, PRRI (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute), the Harvard/Harris Center for American Political Studiesand the Economist/YouGov they confirm the sour mood of the nation today and all point to deep partisan divisions. All show independents closer to Democrats than Republicans on the issue. In mid-September NORC poll of adults, 24% said the country was headed in the right direction, while 75% gave the wrong answer. In the poll, 51 percent of Republicans and 92 percent of Democrats said the country is on the wrong track. Those responses were reversed from those given in January 2024, when 91% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats answered the wrong way.
PRRI used slightly different wording asking people to think about the past year. In their new poll from mid-August to early September, 36% of adults said things were generally going in the right direction, while 62% said the wrong direction. In the poll, there was a huge partisan divide, with 92% of Democrats answering the wrong way compared to 24% of Republicans.
At Harvard/Harris Poll of registered voters, 40% said the country was on the right track and 51% on the wrong track. There was a wide partisan gap as found in the new Economist/YouGov survey.
PRRI asked additional questions. In their poll, only a third thought the economy (and separately, the federal government) was headed in the right direction. People were slightly more positive (41%) about the government’s handling of immigration. And 38% gave the correct answer when asked about how the US treats other countries.
None of these pollsters asked people why they thought the country was on the right or wrong track. As the partisan responses show, some of the explanation is certainly Donald Trump himself and his chaotic actions. Part of it is widespread concern about the economy, especially rising prices.
A question in the PRRI poll suggests another possible explanation. Richard Wirthlin, the Reagan pollster, told me that when his firm asked people why the country was on the wrong track, many people responded with concerns about the nation’s fraying social fabric. PRRI has asked people dozens of times since 2013 whether American culture and our way of life have changed for the better or worse since the 1950s. In some years there was a narrow split, but in others, more people gave the worst answer. This is not, in my view, a yearning for a largely white America where women stayed at home and men worked, but instead a concern about manners and morals that were troubling to many.
Another possible explanation is concern about the size, power, and reach of the federal government. In the 1990s, CBS News found that a majority of Americans believed that government could have a positive impact on people’s lives. When asked a follow-up question, more people consistently said it had a negative impact. Gallup hasn’t updated the same question, but recently came close to one May Gallup/Bentley University Poll. The poll found that more people felt the federal government had the power to affect people’s lives than felt that way about other institutions. In another question, however, they were seen as the least effective institutions to do so. And, in a September Gallup poll, only 31 percent had a lot or some confidence in the federal government to act in society’s best interest. Forty-three percent gave that answer for businesses and 50% for state and local governments.
There is no single explanation for the country’s long-term wrong answers. This makes governance particularly difficult.
