Government is again the number-one perceived problem facing the U.S., having briefly been supplanted last month by immigration issues, according to a new poll released Thursday.
About one-fifth of people surveyed by Gallup in August believe government and poor leadership is the biggest challenge plaguing the country, a mostly consistent finding in the same monthly poll since it first started tracking responses in March.
But in the wake of the controversy surrounding President Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to illegal border crossings, 22 percent of respondents in July ticked immigration as the nation’s most pressing concern. That figure dropped down again to 16 percent in August.
Gallup’s results appear to be driven by politics. One third of Democrats in August named government, under the direction of President Trump, as their primary worry. One-fifth Republicans, on the other hand, listed immigration.
The study comes as both parties fine-tune how they message their national platform to their respective bases ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
The Gallup poll was based on telephone interviews with 1,024 adults between Aug. 1 and Aug. 12. The research has a sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
