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RIGHT TRACK, WRONG TRACK. It’s one of the most fundamental questions in political polling: Do you think the country is on the right track, going in the right direction, or on the wrong track, going in the wrong direction?
Most of the time, more people think the country is on the wrong track than the right track. Right now, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, 68.4 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, versus 23.6 who believe it is on the right track. That is a 44.8 point gap, going in the wrong direction.
Given all the hysteria these days, one might assume that is the worst it has been in a long, long time. It’s not. In October 2013, for example, when the government was in the midst of an extended partial shutdown, 74.9 percent of those surveyed said the country was on the wrong track, versus 17.4 percent who said it was on the right track — a 57.5 point gap.
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In October 2011, with the country still in the depths of the economic downturn, 76.5 percent said it was on the wrong track, versus 17.0 who said it was on the right track — a 59.5 point difference. Other times have had big numbers, too. In July, 2016, there was a 46.8 percent gap between wrong and right track.
So now, people clearly think things are bad, but that’s not terribly unusual. Just look at the RealClearPolitics graph below, from January 2009 until today. The red, wrong track number is normally higher than the black, right track number.
President Trump’s problem is the combination of that gap — 44.8 think the country is on the wrong track — with his own job approval rating. The president has been underwater in job approval from the first moments of his time in office. But he’s having a particularly bad run at the moment.
Right now, according to the RealClearPolitics average, 41.9 percent of those surveyed approve of Trump’s performance, while 55.9 percent disapprove — a 14.0 point gap.
That’s a far cry from not too long ago, in March, when 47.3 percent approved of his performance and 49.7 percent disapproved — a miniscule (for Trump) 2.4 point gap. Also at that moment, the right track-wrong gap was about 17 points — a fraction of what it is today.
It’s no wonder Trump sometimes seems fixated on those days in February and March, when he had just been acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial and the economy was strong. “Then the virus came in, and the world is a different place,” he said sadly this week.
Can Trump still win re-election with job approval and right track, wrong track numbers like today’s? His best hope is not that the numbers will miraculously snap back to what they were in March — that seems unlikely — but that they will be on a clear upward trajectory by election day. People often vote on how they perceive things to be going, not on where things were at some point in the past. But there is no doubt Trump is in a deep hole. His supporters like to dismiss polls as wrong, irrelevant, or totally fake. But voters’ views on the state of the country today make Trump’s job on November 3 look increasingly difficult.
