Here’s a surprising result from the New Hampshire primary exit polls. On the question of whether “life for the next generation of Americans” will be better than today, worse than today or about the same, only 25 percent of Democrats say that it will be better and 38 percent say it will be worse. Among the (more numerous) Republicans, 44 percent say it will be better than today and 33 percent worse. So almost twice as many Republicans as Democrats are optimistic, and half again as many Democrats as Republicans are pessimistic.
From a partisan point of view this seems weird. Usually members of the president’s party are more optimistic about the trend of the nation, just as they give the president higher job approval than do members of the other party.
But you might not be surprised to learn this if you listened to the concession speeches of the two parties’ candidates on primary night. Hillary Clinton, going first (a lady’s privilege?), painted a dismal picture of a country laboring under terrible economic difficulties and rife with vicious prejudice against blacks, women, LGBT persons and so forth. This was punctuated by just occasional bows to President Obama’s record (she needs the votes of black Democrats, who have a high regard for him and think he’s undervalued by whites).
Bernie Sanders painted an even bleaker picture. All gains in the society go to the top 1 percent and to the criminal but surprisingly unprosecuted denizens of Wall Street. (Sanders and others of his ilk lament that no Wall Streeters have been prosecuted, but don’t specify what crimes they’ve committed. Some others hold to the quaint notion that you can’t jail people without showing they violated an actual — you know — law.)
It looks like the Democratic Party’s character as a coalition of the diverse aggrieved overshadows any recognition of the work of a Democratic president. For two years, he had a heavily Democratic Congress, which indeed produced mountains of new laws and regulations. Has all this accomplished nothing? Is there no beneficial trend Democrats perceive, which might prove that their policies work?
Evidently not. Which you might take as evidence that government is not as capable a mechanism as their calls for more government suggest they are confident that it is. You might notice that all of government’s intervention in healthcare provision and finance have not prevented Sanders from calling for free healthcare, and that the vast increases in college tuition and fees have occurred in tandem with (and surely to a large extent are caused by) the availability of federal college loans.
But then, why are so many Republicans optimistic? Surely they are not sure their side will win the next presidential election; there are reasons justifying optimism but nothing like certainty. That’s a bit more of a puzzle. I think it comes down to something like temperament. Republicans tend to have more stable lives: more of them are married, more of them are religious, more have higher incomes. As research by American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks has shown, people who are married, religious and affluent tend to be happier than those who are not.
Perhaps temperamentally optimistic people tend to be more politically conservative. And, hey, maybe the balance of opinion in New Hampshire is atypical of the rest of the country on this point.
But I think it’s an interesting anomaly that, at least in New Hampshire, members of the president’s party are more pessimistic than members of the other party. So it’s not likely we’ll hear a lot of cheerful rhetoric this presidential election year.
