Just 23% Say Situation in Afghanistan Will Be Better in Six Months
As President Obama and his staff consider delaying the withdrawal date for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, voters remain pessimistic about the longest-lasting conflict in American history.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 23% of Likely Voters believe the situation in Afghanistan will get better over the next six months. Forty-one percent (41%) feel the situation will get worse, while another 29% think it will stay about the same. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
These findings have shown little change since early June of last year except for a brief flurry of enthusiasm late in the year after the president announced his new strategy for the conflict.
Voters are more evenly divided about Iraq now, however. Thirty-one percent (31%) say the situation in Iraq will get better over the next six months, the highest level of optimism measured since late April. Thirty-three percent (33%) say it will get worse, while slightly fewer (30%) feel the situation there will remain roughly the same.
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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters nationwide was conducted on November 9-10, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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