2013
America heading in the wrong direction, but less wrong than a few weeks ago. Whoopee!😬. What’s wrong with this picture? Shouldn’t the majority of Americans think we are headed in the right direction, especially with all the hope and change going on? If we are not headed in the right direction, perhaps it’s time to change direction. 😎
Twenty-six percent (26%) of Likely U.S. Voters think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey for the week ending November 24.
This marks little change from the previous week when 25% felt the country was headed the right way. Still, it’s an improvement from early last month when confidence in the country’s course fell to 13% during the partial federal government shutdown. It was the lowest finding in five years. The week before Election Day a year ago, 43% said the country was heading in the right direction.
During President Obama’s first months in office, the number of voters who felt the country was headed in the right direction rose steadily to 40% in early May 2009. In 2010 and 2011, confidence fell to the narrow range of 14% to 19%, levels similar to those measured in the final months of the George W. Bush administration. Optimism began easing up again in mid-December 2011.
Sixty-seven percent (67%) of voters now think the country is headed down the wrong track, also little changed from last week but down from a recent high of 80% last month. From January 2009 until October 2012, belief that the country was on the wrong track ranged from 55% to 80%, but it tracked in the low 50s from just before Election Day until early December.
The national telephone survey of 3,500 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports on November 18-24, 2013. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Fieldwork for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Outside of my own areas of career expertise (show biz and health care), I don’t feel qualified to make a global judgment about where the country “should” be going, so I find that kind of polling a bit silly. As a scientist, I’m more comfortable reviewing factual results to see where it HAS gone. If the results are negative, the government should alter the parameters of experimentation and try again. Otherwise it’s all just guessing.
That’s not how politics works I realize, but then what kind of results have been produced from political behavior lately? Gridlock definitely has had a negative effect, and I’m not at all sure how to get past it. More and smaller political parties, to force the big two to share power?
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