https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-desperate-new-beginning-2024-election-voter-sentiment-polls-gop-primary-biden-trump-3fde70cd?mod=opinion_featst_pos2
We don’t need polls to tell us that confidence in our political institutions is at a low ebb, but they do help clarify what Americans are feeling.
In a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 10% of Americans reported that thinking about U.S. politics made them feel hopeful, and 4% were excited. By contrast, 55% said they were angry, and 65% were exhausted.
This isn’t the first poll to note a pervasive sense of exhaustion, and I suspect it won’t be the last. Americans are tired of partisan quarrels that rarely reach a resolution. Issues like immigration reform linger for decades, and the Supreme Court has brought new ones such as abortion back into the arena.
Joe Biden was elected, in part, to calm this turbulence. Historians will debate whether he could have done so had he pursued a different agenda, but clearly his administration hasn’t reduced division, whether over economics, culture or foreign policy.
Americans blame both parties about equally for this situation. According to Pew, 60% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, and 61% have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party.
A recent CBSpoll found that 54% of respondents regard the Republican Party as “extreme,” one of the favorite epithets of Democrats describing the GOP. But the same percentage also regards the Democrats as extreme, and only minorities think that either political party is “reasonable.”