In September 2015, a Pew survey asked "Thinking about the way things are going in politics today...on the issues that matter to you would you say your side has been winning more often than it's been losing, or losing more often than it's been winning?" The question has been repeated a number of times since then, most recently in September 2022. The figure shows the percent who said that their side was generally winning broken down by party--the colors distinguish between supporters of the President's party (Democrats in 2015 and 2016, Republicans 2017-2020, and Democrats in 2021-2).
Unsurprisingly, supporters of the President's party are more likely to think that they are winning than supporters of the opposition party are. The unexpected part is that the views of supporters of the president's party are more variable--in the opposition party, "winning" ranged from 14-22%, which is probably not much more than would be expected from sampling variation; in the president's party, it ranges from 31% to 69%. The highest value occurred in May 2019. Trump supporters generally say that his greatest accomplishments were the tax bill, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices, and the Abraham accords, and maybe the program to develop Covid vaccines, none of which occurred around that time. The most plausible explanation for the positive feelings among Republicans is the release of the Mueller report, which was generally regarded as a political victory for Trump because it wasn't as damaging as many had expected. On this interpretation, Republicans had the greatest sense of success after avoiding a loss rather than after a positive accomplishment, which shows the strength of negative partisanship.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
A few other interesting things: (1) the low results for the president's party are all during the Biden admin, and they're all lower than the lowest level for Trump admin. Can we cast this result squarely on Manchin? He successfully blocked a big chunk of the Biden agenda, and it's not too surprising that ratings are moving lower as Repubs retook the house. In the current environment that spells certain doom for any leftish Biden initiatives. (2) given your posited explanation for the highest measurement, it's interesting that there's a gap during the late Trump / early Biden admin. Would be interesting to know where each group stood during that time, especially given the "election fraud" claims by Trump. Granted, it's a period of power transition, but it would still be interesting to see the data.
ReplyDeleteOverall though it's not a very long record.
Unfortunately, the question wasn't asked in the later part of the Trump administration. The somewhat low ratings for the Biden administration make sense--people don't generally see him as very successful in getting his policies through congress (it may not be accurate, but that's the perception).
Deletejust a comment on the graphs: it would be useful to have a vertical line for a) elections; and b) power transfers; or a shaded box filling the area between the two.
ReplyDelete