My last post talked about the declining optimism about the future of today's youth among Republicans during Obama's time in office. I was looking at the last survey for which individual-level data were available (December 2012) to see if I could find anything that shed light on it. That survey had a number of questions about expectations for the next year, some of which go back a long way. One of them was whether you thought the coming year would be "a year when America will increase its power in the world, a year when American power will decline." Ultimately, it would be interesting to look at a breakdown by party, but here are the overall numbers:
Expectations in 2012 (ie expectations of 2013) were almost the most pessimistic ever, trailing only 1973. Expectations in 2017 (ie expectations of 2018) were more optimistic, but still evenly split (49% to 49%). As far as you can tell given the missing years, we seem to be in the most sustained low since the data began. I was surprised to see that expectations bounced back strongly in the late 1970s--in 1979, 58% expected American influence to grow in 1980, only 30% to decline.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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