26% Say U.S. Heading in Right Direction

Just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey for the week ending November 23.

For the previous three weeks, this finding held steady at 27%. The number of voters who think the country is on the right course has now ranged from 23% to 27% nearly every week since early June and has been below 30% most weeks since June of last year.

These numbers didn’t budge following Election Day and the Republican takeover of the entire Congress. Perhaps in part that’s because 59% of voters believe most voters are likely to be disappointed with Republicans in Congress before the 2016 elections.

Sixty-seven percent (65%) of voters now believe the nation is headed down the wrong track, up two points from a week ago.

A year ago at this time, the findings were identical: 26% said the country was heading in the right direction, while 67% thought it was heading down the wrong track.

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 The national telephone survey of 3,500 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports from November 17-23, 2014. 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 74% of voters not affiliated with either major political party think the country is on the wrong track. Democrats are almost evenly divided.
   
 Fifty-three percent (53%) of blacks think the country is heading in the right direction. Seventy-four percent (74%) of whites and 53% of other minority voters say the country is on the wrong track. 

Eighty-three percent (83%) of politically conservative voters and 65% of moderates say the country is headed down the wrong track. Liberal voters are closely divided on the question.

A grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri has opted not to indict Officer Darren Wilson. Americans didn’t expect the white police officer who killed a black teenager in Ferguson to be charged with murder, but they did anticipate the violent protests that erupted in light of that decision.

Several major technology companies like Google, Apple and Facebook supported a recently blocked bill in the U.S. Senate that would have placed tighter restrictions on the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records, but 47% of voters think such companies are more likely than the government to be monitoring their personal communications and Internet activity.

While most Americans say their interest rates haven’t changed over the past year, roughly half still expect them to go up over the next 12 months.

Twenty-eight percent (28%) think it’s too easy to become an American citizen these days.

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