Tag Archives: Gallup

Losing The American Mind

Posted on by under Election 2020, Environmental Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

When Donald Trump first began actively campaigning in 2015, his slogan was “make America great again”.  Now, after he’s had nearly four years in office, he has done, it would seem, just the opposite.  He has not only devalued our status in the eyes of the rest of the world, but has made our own lives worse in nearly every possible way.  I can attest to that, for I have never been so deep in the rabbit hole in all my nearly 70 years as I am today.  Take a look at Dana Milbank’s column in The Washington Post yesterday …

Trump has made Americans’ lives worse. Here’s the proof.

Opinion by

Dana-MilbankDana Milbank

Columnist

September 19, 2020 

Donald Trump’s America is one sad place.

We, as a nation, have fallen into a great depression, though not necessarily an economic one. By one highly respected gauge, self-reported levels of happiness are at their lowest since social scientists began asking such questions half a century ago.

Much of this is because of the pandemic, and the economic fallout, but the troubles predate the virus. Overall mental well-being dropped noticeably after President Trump’s election in 2016, in red and blue states alike. Happiness became decoupled from financial security, and evidence points to a “Trump Effect” — an American public depressed because of extraordinary vitriol in politics, chaos in the news and a government out of control — even before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Friday night, a mere 78 minutes after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death announcement, announced with rank hypocrisy he would hold a quick vote to replace her.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which has conducted an annual survey of the national mood since 1972, found this summer that the proportion of people describing themselves as “very happy” had plummeted to 14 percent — compared with the survey’s previous record low of 29 percent, recorded after the 2008 financial crisis. But NORC researchers were startled to find that, despite this year’s economic shutdown, 36 percent declared themselves “satisfied” with their financial situation, the highest in the study’s history, and the fewest ever expressed dissatisfaction. (This was when generous unemployment support was in effect.)

For the first time, “there’s a disconnect between financial satisfaction and overall happiness,” says David Sterrett, senior researcher for the NORC study. “With everything going on socially and politically, those have become more of a driver.”

Other research, by Gallup, gives an idea of the cause. There’s typically a partisan effect after elections. After 2008, for example, Democrats and Democratic constituencies (minorities, women, low-income Americans) felt better about their lives, while Republicans and their constituencies felt worse. But something very different happened after 2016: Well-being measures dropped substantially for Democratic constituencies, as expected, but independents’ happiness also dropped, and there was no corresponding jump in the sense of well-being among Republicans or among Whites. Actually, they declined, though within the margin of error.

In sum, well-being among all American adults declined “substantially” with Trump’s election — even though the economy was expanding. Meanwhile, the population in 21 states (many in Trump country) had a significant decline in well-being in 2017 — a huge shift in one year — and not one state experienced an increase. More Americans complained of worry, lost pleasure in activities and less positive energy from friends, family and leaders. Those had all been stable from 2014 to 2016. After Trump’s election, they all worsened — and stayed worse.

Dan Witters, research director of Gallup’s well-being studies, tells me the nonpartisan polling group concluded it could objectively state that there’s “a rather obvious Trump effect.”

Republicans’ sense of well-being didn’t improve, Witters says, “because of the way the social fabric has been strained in the Trump era.” Elevated anxiety “disproportionately affected Democrats, but it threw enough sand in the gears of Republicans and supporters of Trump that it prevented their well-being from getting much of a lift.”

There’s abundant support for this. In 2019, pre-pandemic, University of Nebraska researchers found that 4 in 10 said politics had made them stressed, 3 in 10 said it caused them to lose their temper and 2 in 10 said it caused problems sleeping and damaged friendships.

The American Psychological Association in 2017 found two-thirds of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, were stressed about the future of the nation. That jumped to 83 percent this year, with 66 percent saying government’s handling of the pandemic causes significant stress.

“Things weren’t great before the pandemic,” says Rachel Garfield, a vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. And now the national mood has fallen off a cliff. An August Kaiser poll found that 53 percent of adults say the pandemic has hurt their mental health. Many cite problems with sleeping, eating, alcohol and drugs. Those reporting symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorders nearly quadrupled during the pandemic, to 40 percent.

All this means, sadly, that the American psyche won’t bounce back fully when the economy recovers, nor when the virus is beaten. The depression wouldn’t necessarily lift if Trump were defeated, particularly if he continued to stoke rage among supporters.

But if Trump returns to office, I fear, the national despair will deepen as we resume lurching from crisis to crisis with the same destabilizing chaos. This week alone we’ve seen Trump attacking his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Attorney General Bill Barr attacking his own Justice Department, and the administration hurling charges of “sedition” at government scientists and demonstrators, and a wildly hypocritical McConnell, after blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nominee because it was eight months before an election, announcing plans just six weeks before an election to rush through a Ginsburg replacement.

After delivering a paranoid rant about armed insurrection, senior Trump administration official Michael Caputo this week blamed his high “stress level” and took a leave of absence. He said “every American” fighting the pandemic “has been under enormous pressure. I am just one of them.”

He’s right about that. After four years, we are barely holding it together. Surely four more years would cause the losing of the American mind.

toon-1

Obama UP … Trump and Congress DOWN

Posted on by under Political commentary

The news of the day is that President Obama is more popular among the people now!  I know, I know … the haters are shaking their heads right about now saying “That cannot be right.  He is the worst president ever. He should be impeached”, and all the other babble-phrases of which they are so enamoured.  But it is a fact, one that is confirmed by several of the more accurate polls, that President Obama’s approval rating averages 49%.  Obama’s approval ratings are actually very close to those of Ronald Reagan in March 1988, his final year in office. There are likely a number of reasons and the republicans may be interested (appalled?) to note that they are a large part of the reason!  It is also interesting to note that Donald Trump’s approval rating is in decline, as is Congress’.  I believe these three are connected.

Donald Trump’s decline to an average of 30.4% in the polls is not surprising at all. The only thing surprising is that it took this long for his decline to begin.  It would seem that a couple of things may be coming into play.  First, I think that his rhetoric is getting old and stale, his supporters are getting tired of hearing the same old buzzwords and phrases, and are looking for him to step up to the plate with some details about exactly how he plans to “make America great again”.  In the beginning, there was excitement at the novelty of his approach, his bull-in-a-china-shop bluster, but the shine is wearing thin and the tarnish beneath starting to show through. At the end of the day, people want a president who acts … well, presidential. Second, as his delegate count began to rise, and it looked for a brief time as if he could possibly receive the necessary 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination, people began to take his candidacy, if not the man himself, seriously and I think it became a real stretch for most to actually picture him sitting in the Oval Office.  Third, there is only one group in the nation who he has failed to insult, white males.  While it is true that he does still have a following among some women, those numbers have begun to shrink also.  Presumably women are awakening to the fact that he views them as objects and as second-class citizens, much as he views minorities and immigrants. Recent television interviews have only given Trump a venue to reiterate his arrogance and immaturity — see his interview with Anderson Cooper  on 29 March, when Cooper said to Trump: “But, sir, with all due respect, that’s the argument of 5-year-old.” (Is not this just what I have been saying all along?)

Congress’ decline in approval rating, which currently stands at an average of only 14.3%, also needs little explanation.  It can be summarized with the refusal of most republicans in the senate to even consider holding confirmation hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.  Mitch McConnell has single-handedly (well, alright, he has had some help from other republican senators, but he is the driving force on this one) doomed Congress’ approval ratings, since 52% of voters support confirmation hearings at this time, and only 29% are opposed.  The other 19% were bored and fell asleep, I presume.

Polls are fickle, unreliable things, but some are more accurate than others.  According to FiveThirtyEight   (538), a group that monitors and analyzes economic and political polls, among the most reliable are Selzer, ABC/Washington Post, CNN/Research Corp., and NBC/Wall Street Journal.  Surprisingly, Gallup, the most well-known, only gets a C+ rating from 538.  In addition to looking at a number of the more reliable polls, it is important to notice trends.  In the early days of Trump’s campaign, he began every speech, every interview, citing his poll numbers as of that morning.  The numbers for a given day may or may not have meaning, as it is the trend that counts.

Every poll I looked at from Gallup to ABC News to Selzer follows the same pattern … Obama is gaining ground, Trump and Congress are losing ground.  What does it mean?  Nothing, really, at least in terms of President Obama’s ratings, beyond the fact that it would be nice if he left office next January with a higher approval rating.  As for Trump?  My opinion is that it only confirms what many of us already knew … he will not be the next president of the U.S.  The most important of the three, is likely the approval rating of Congress.  As I have mentioned before, there are 24 republican senators up for re-election in November, and if the overall approval rating of congress continues to decline, those 24 will have a much more difficult time seeing another term. Again, all polls, even those considered the most reliable, are flawed, but when all polls report the same trend, the old saying “where there is smoke, there is fire” comes to mind.