It’s right there in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, like a sore thumb in camouflage. Amid all the numbers about the public’s opinion of the president and the tea party and the state of affairs is a year-end, 30,000-foot question about the previous 12 months: “Compared with other years, do you think that 2014 was one of the best years for the United States, above average, about average, below average, or one of the worst years for the United States?”
The answer, as they say in headlines nowadays, will depress the hell out of you.
Only 14 percent of respondents rated this year as “above average” or better for the country. More than half said it was “below average” or worse. And remarkably, that’s a superior mark in the recent past.
The inquiry has been posed the last four Decembers of the Obama presidency. Each time, a majority of respondents said the country’s year was either subpar or historically bad, with a high of 70 percent in 2013. In fact, this year was the first time during the period that the portion of survey participants responding with above average or better cracked a pitiful 9 percent.
Going back to 2002 — the question has been asked 8 of the last 13 years — that figure has never exceeded 15 percent.
It’s been raining in America.
The results haven’t always been so dreary. In 1994, for instance, a 72-percent majority said the year was at least decent. With gaps in the data, however — none exists for the entirety of President Clinton’s second term and most of the tumultuous bridge years between Presidents Bush and Obama — it’s difficult to form a complete trend.
What is clear from the numbers, however, is a reflection of the nation’s growing politicization.
“I think things have become more partisan,” Jeff Horwitt, vice president of one of the polling firms behind the NBC/WSJ product, Hart Research Associates, told Red Alert. “You can see that back then there were some divisions by party, but it’s not nearly as stark as it was in the Bush years, and especially now in the Obama years.”
According to figures provided to Red Alert Politics, for example, all three subgroups of respondents in 1993 and 1994 — Republicans, independents and Democrats — said the nation’s year had been average or better. The spread between GOP and Democrat participants was never any greater than 19 points: 58 and 77 in 1993, and 64 and 81 in 1994, respectively.
A sampling of two more recent years with Bush and then Obama in the White House is yawningly different. In 2005, 64 percent of Republicans responded average or above, compared with just 14 percent of Democrats — a 50-point spread. For this most recent year, that flips to 22 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats, a 48-point difference.
After appearing in the poll four years running and 12 times overall, the question will become a fixture in future releases.
