32% Say U.S. Heading in Right Direction

Thirty-two percent (32%) of Likely U.S. Voters now think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey for the week ending July 16.

This finding is up one point from 31% the week before and marks the third week in a row that the number of voters who say the country is heading in the right direction has been in the 30s. From late December through the beginning of March, 30% or more of voters said every week that the country was heading in the right direction, but the weekly findings fell back into the mid- to high 20s after that.

Sixty-three percent (63%) now believe the nation is headed down the wrong track, unchanged from a week earlier.

A year ago at this time, 26% felt the country was heading in the right direction, while 67% thought it was on the wrong track.

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The national telephone survey of 2,500 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports from July 12-16, 2015. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republicans and 66% of voters not affiliated with either major political party think the country is on the wrong track. But 53% of Democrats think the country is going in the right direction. 

Most voters of all ages agree the country is headed in the wrong direction, but voters under 40 are less pessimistic than their elders. 

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of whites and 53% of other minority voters believe the country is headed down the wrong track. Black voters are closely divided.

Liberals are far more confident about the direction of the country than conservatives and moderates are. 

The more strongly a voter approves of President Obama's performance, the more likely he or she is to think the country is headed in the right direction. 

More than six years into Barack Obama's presidency, voters still tend to blame George W. Bush more than the current occupant of the White House for the state the U.S. economy is in.

Most voters have been telling us for years that they favor spending cuts in every program of the federal government, but they remain skeptical that those cuts are ever going to come.

Unlike most states and the federal government, it looks like consumers will be cutting back their spending in several areas next month.

Most voters think they already work hard enough and disagree with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush that they need to work even harder to help fix the economy.

Just 39% of voters favor the agreement the United States has reached with Iran that ends some economic sanctions on that country in exchange for verifiable cutbacks in the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Following what appears to be the largest cyberattack against the federal government ever, voters seriously doubt the government can protect their private information and question its performance at protecting secrets. Sixty-four percent (64%) now think a cyberattack by another country poses a bigger economic threat than a traditional military attack.

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