The Misleading Right Track/Wrong Track Question

14.05.2008

Brendan Nyhan and Mori Dinauer have some thoughts on the startling right track/wrong track numbers in this week's ABC/Washington Post poll. Mori writes:

[T]he periods where a majority of Americans felt the country was on the right track are few and far between. The only sustained period, in fact, was during the late 90s, presumably because of the economic boom. This chart doesn't go back this far, but I'm willing to bet the rest of the 1970s were just as bad, and the late 60s not much better, which suggests that Americans haven't been happy with the direction of the country since the postwar boom, and that economic conditions had a lot--if not everything--to do with it.

I think this is probably wrong. More likely, it's an instance of the general phenomenon in public-opinion polling that when you ask people to evaluate large, nebulous, messy institutions ("Congress", "government", etc.) you tend to get very pessimistic responses. But when you ask people to evaluate more specific things (their own congressman, Medicare, etc.) you get a far rosier picture. This helps explain why, though Americans seem to always think the country is on the wrong track, most people tend to be relatively sanguine about their own personal financial situation. Of course, this doesn't mean that the right track/wrong track numbers are meaningless--the fact that the wrong-track figure is at a near-record high does suggest the obvious, namely that people are exceptionally dissatisfied with the Bush administration. But just because 82 percent of people say the country is on the wrong track doesn't imply that 82 percent of Americans think their lives suck.

There's also the interesting question of exactly why the wrong-track number is at 82 percent. It just seems hard to make the case that things in America are objectively as bad as they've been in the history of polling. The economy is sputtering but not, by historical standards, abominable; the war in Iraq is unpopular, but its social salience pales in comparison to that of Vietnam. One gets the sense that the nation's public ethos during the Bush era just makes people viscerally unhappy and pessimistic in a way that's difficult to quantify or explain.

--Josh Patashnik

Posted: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 2:59 PM with 7 comment(s)

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ramboorider said:

"There's also the interesting question of exactly why the wrong-track number is at 82 percent."

Seems to me it has something to do with the sub-conscious but very real emerging understanding that we're really blowing it on energy, which is having (and is likely to keep having) dire consequences for both our economy and environment. That our oil-based economy isn't gonna keep humming along and we've waited far too long to begin to seriously address this. That the economy just isn't gonna turn around when oil prices are only going to keep trending upward. That we've been consciously been making decisions over the last decade or more (by which time we knew better) that are setting the stage for a hugely diminished economy and environment for our kids and grandkids. That the answer probably means having to get by with less, not more, which is not something most Americans have had to face in our lifetimes. That the related climate change problems are resulting in, and likely to continue to result in, food shortages as agricultural patterns change around the world. The growing realization that we may have unalterably screwed the pooch and it ain't (as the NEW Hillary might say) gonna come unscrewed.

This is just my guess - but its at the root of my feelings of dread and many currently comfortable people I've talked to, so I gotta figure there's SOMEthing to it.

May 14, 2008 3:19 PM

liberal reformer said:

This is a well - reasoned post, Josh. I too have noticed the disconnect over the years between how people view their own situation, as opposed to the nation's as a whole. A simillar phenomenon is the popular disgust with incumbents in Congress on a national level, even as so may people are mainly satisfied with their own incumbent. The public ethos is in disrepair and I think that a generalized angst is the result. This would mean that Bush has united us, after all, only against him.

May 14, 2008 3:29 PM

AlanSP said:

I'm not sure I agree with the last part of your analysis. The "right direction/wrong track" question isn't necessarily about the current state of affairs, but rather about whether things are getting better or getting worse (in calculus terms, it's about f'(x) rather than f(x).).

Also, the question isn't "how wrong a track?" It doesn't take degree into account except insofar as worse situations generally generate more consensus. Since different people have different criteria for what it means to be moving in the right/wrong direction (military, social, economic, etc.), it might reflect the fact that things are getting worse in many different ways (unpopular war, flagging economy, environment, education, etc.), rather than any one of those ways being historically bad.

May 14, 2008 3:42 PM

JSmith125 said:

"One gets the sense that the nation's public ethos during the Bush era just makes people viscerally unhappy and pessimistic in a way that's difficult to quantify or explain."

I think people probably hear the question as meaning "the country as politically led" -- that is, the "track" metaphor actually registers with most respondents. That tends to make the responses binary: the country is not just a place or a state of mind, but a vehicle in motion, heading in some direction that is either the right one or not. Therefore, any one failing of political leadership, even a single policy that the respondent disagrees with intensely enough, could flip the answer from "right track" to "wrong track." So the question is collecting all sorts of incommensurable grievances: a fundamentalist thinks the country is on the wrong track because there are too many abortions and gay-pride parades, a union activist because unions are weak and threatened, etc.

Further, under this theory people would be more likely to say "wrong track" if they were angered over things that they thought political leaders could correct but don't, as opposed to something that seems out of anyone's control. So, the generally good conditions that are just background noise -- a mostly prosperous nation, racial tolerance that is now high enough to make a black man a serious presidential condtender, etc. -- don't control people's responses to this question the way something like the president's deliberate failure to pull of out of Iraq does. (People might be happy with the quality of the train itself, but still critical of the engineer; it's not the train's fault if he's driving it down the wrong track.) If that's right, then the question is really something of an expanded presidential (or sometimes, ruling-party) job-approval rating, and I imagine you would find that it tracks that rating pretty closely.

May 14, 2008 4:08 PM

tnmats said:

Personally, the 'wrong' track is easy to explain. Americans look at their country as a whole and see us sliding relative to the world. We're used to being #1 in just about everything and that's not true anymore. It was bound to happen as other countries' economies became more advanced, but the rapidity as which things slid in the last 6-8 years really scares a lot of us. Add to that a war without end that is draining the national treasury with NOTHING to show for it and it all makes sense.

Just look at our manufacturing sector; it's a shell of what it used to be. Plus many of us who used to think our jobs were relatively safe now don't think that (just ask any engineer). Add it all up and there's an unease that this time things are structurally going wrong in this country.

May 14, 2008 4:29 PM

ryanmacd said:

If I were asked that question, my response wouldn't reflect my feelings about my life NOW (that my life currently sucks or does not suck), it would be an expression of my worries about the future. I think many--myself included--have lives that, while currently not sucking, increasingly seem precarious in some way. I don't think it;s that hard to explain.

May 14, 2008 10:58 PM

teplukhin2you said:

A very useful graph that highlights the fact that our current anxieties are chronic, and structural, and have everything to do with the erosion of the position of the American working class that began in the 1970s (see peak pessimism point #1--1977), abated slightly due to the soft landing after the 1981-82 recession, and then came back with a vengeance in the early 1990s.

In other words, this phenom has next to nothing to do with GW Bush and everything to do with the failure of the nation's political class to deliver anything like a reasonable expectation of economic security to that 60%+ of Americans who are not either a) superbly well-positioned to succeed in the capital markets, b) members of a public sector union, or c) engaged in surfing the latest Fed-engineered asset bubble.

Again, the latest peak _merely brings us back to where we were SIXTEEN YEARS AGO-- and just slightly above where we were in the last year of Bill Clinton's first term, a few months before the Netscape IPO.

This chart tells us that Americans aren't buying Tweedledee and Tweedledum's proferred solution to our manufacturing slide, that their bread-and-circus economy, with a healthy dose of dumb identity politics and culture wars, offers no security, no opportunity and no real hope for people who aren't educated enough, and cynical enough, to make it in this Age of Global Capital.

May 15, 2008 2:02 AM