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Trivia Tidbit Of The Day: Part 309 -- Faking Dissatisfaction.

Republicans Way More Satisfied Than Democrats-

Looming over the country right now is a vague sense of dissatisfaction. Nobody seems happy with much of anything. Democrats, who are dissatisfied with their own leadership almost as much as the President himself, are gloomy for obvious reasons. Many Republicans, meanwhile, are also dissatisfied. Some conservatives are wondering why many GOP Senators in particular are acting like liberals. Where is the Social Security reform? And major tax reform? Others are wondering why abortion is still legal, why Terri Schiavo was dehydrated to death, why the entertainment industrial-complex is still run by radical left-wingers, why the borders still have not been sealed off with a giant wall, and so on.

There's this weird angst out there, occasionally cutting across and between partisan lines, about Iraq and outsourcing (offshoring, really) and China and globalization and oil prices and housing bubbles and bird flu and terrorism and and record budget deficits and AIDS and poverty and foreign management of port operations and racism and tsunamis and hurricanes and global warming and health care and SUVs and Wal-Mart and religion and attacks on religion and corruption and corporate scandals and Iran and everything else out there that's frightening and new about the world.

That being said, there's plenty to be satisfied about. Moreso than usual, even. And certainly moreso than in most of the rest of the world. Meanwhile, most of the concerns listed above are easily dismissed or explained with a little research and a lot of perspective. For the most part, whether it's the economy or the environment, things are almost unanimously better than they've ever been.

The economy, usually the root of all polling satisfaction or lack thereof, is steaming ahead.

Lots of new jobs (.pdf):

Continuous GDP growth (.pdf):

Inflation, amazingly, has remained low. Existing and new home sales continue to boom, as ever more Americans own their own homes. There's just a lot of good economic news out there. And there has been a lot of good economic news for quite a while now.

Yet, people remain relatively dissatisfied with the economy.

More than that, for the first time in the George W. Bush presidency, satisfaction has dipped below 30%. Put into context, this has happened in every single presidency since the 1970s, but it often rebounds:

But if we look closer, we discover that this dip is different from previous dips. This dip is driven by a truly record low of Democrats who express satisfaction, even as a solid majority of Republicans express satisfaction. The chasm between partisans is truly chasmic:

In other words, Democrats are essentially as dissatisfied as they have ever been. Ever. Clearly, Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus. In prior sub-30 satisfaction situations, it's been bi-partisan. This one, not so much.

It makes one wonder whether some folks on the other side of the aisle might be responding to these polls a bit differently than in the past. Because polls have usurped front-and-center on the political stage, people are beginning to understand that how one answers certain poll questions has consequences. So, if the question can reflect negatively on Bush, go for it, even if it's not true.

Incidentally, the Pew Research Center blames President Clinton's sub-30 satisfaction level on the economy. "The Clinton administration inherited that bad economy," they claim.

How many times does this claim need to be refuted, anyway? As Clinton assumed office, the recession had ended many months before. It was this president, George W. Bush, that inherited a weak economy, not President Clinton in 1992. However, it was President Clinton, not this president, who received a boost in poll ratings from a booming economy.

Will President George W. Bush ever receive a poll rating boost that reflects the strength of the American economy today? There's still nearly 3 years left in his term, so I wouldn't rule anything out.

Previous Trivia Tidbit: Marriage.

Posted by Will Franklin · 27 March 2006 04:22 PM

Comments

Posted by: SactoDan at March 27, 2006 10:03 PM

Posted by: Kenny at April 27, 2006 05:03 PM

Posted by: Simon at April 27, 2006 05:03 PM