MICHIGAN

• One ABC News/Ipsos survey in November 2023 showed three-quarters of Americans believed the country was on the “wrong track.” Only 23% believed it was headed in the “right direction.” And the survey was not an outlier.
• Poll after poll shows a sizable majority of the nation’s residents disapprove of its course.
• Have Americans – long seen as upbeat, can-do optimists – really grown dour about the state of the nation and where it’s headed?

An ‘astonishing finding’

“Do you feel things in the country are generally going in the right direction, or do you feel things have gotten off on the wrong track?” That question or one very much like it is well known to anyone who has glanced at a poll story or studied the data of a survey in the past 50 years.

• These public opinion surveys, often sponsored by news organizations, seek to understand where the public stands on the key issues of the day.
• Political parties and candidates often conduct their own surveys with a version of the “right direction/wrong track” question to better understand their constituencies and potential voters.
• In 2023, we worked with Ipsos to survey more than 5,000 people across the country in all those community types.
• One of the big ones: In every community we surveyed, at least 70% said the country was on the “wrong track.” And that is an astonishing finding.

Agreement for different reasons

• The community types we study are radically different from each other.
• Some are full of people with bachelor’s degrees, while others have few.
• Some of the communities voted for President Joe Biden by landslide numbers in 2020, while others did the same for Donald Trump.
• Given those differences, how could they be in such a high level of agreement on the direction of the country?
• In 2020, Biden won 86% of the vote in big metropolitan Manhattan, and Trump won 60% in aging, rural Chenango.

Opposite views in same answer

• There may be some value in chronicling Americans’ unhappiness with the state of their country, but as a stand-alone question, “right direction/wrong track” is not very helpful.
• It turns out that one person’s idea about the country being on the wrong track may be completely the opposite of another person’s version of America’s wrong direction.

Dante Chinni receives funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for his work on the American Communities Project and is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Ari Pinkus receives funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the American Communities Project.