Notwithstanding the fact that recent polls show him competitive with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in November, John McCain has an uphill battle to win this year, and this is one of the main reasons why:
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.
Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.
A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.
As the representative of the incumbent party, it’s McCain who is going to have the toughest burden overcoming this pessimism.
April 4th, 2008 at 10:36 am
These polls come up every so often, and are utterly meaningless as reported. What needs to be added is “what (wrong) direction is the track headed?”. For example, I think the country is heading too far left overall, but I doubt any leftists would agree with me.