Decline in trust of government didn’t start with Donald Trump, decades of surveys show
The respected, nonpartisan Pew Research Center is constantly measuring the opinions of the American people on just about everything in public life, with a good deal of focus on all the political issues.
The methods Pew uses to accurately determine what we are thinking is summed up with how the center structures survey questions. “Writing clear and neutral survey questions,” Pew’s director of research explains, “is much more difficult than it might seem.”
Pew has been tracking public opinion on the question of trust in government since 1958. Its most recent findings, published just a few days ago, reveal just how little trust we have these days and how much the partisan divide has grown.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans and Democrats are found to trust government more when a president of their party is in office. Deep divisions showed up first in the Ronald Reagan years, with Republicans’ trust in government reaching a high of 57 percent, while Democrats’ was about 20 points lower.
Those measures for both parties plummeted significantly during the Obama presidency and have not rebounded since Donald Trump, was elected although attitudes entirely flipped when the transition occurred.
Democrats’ trust in government never exceeded 34 percent during all eight years when Obama occupied the White House, while Republicans’ trust hovered around 11 percent.
Those numbers completely reversed when Trump moved into the White House, and today, they track the same low levels of overall approval that we saw in his predecessor’s administration.
The highest level of trust for either party’s followers since the Lyndon Johnson administration in the 1960s occurred in the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency, when trust among Republicans approached 70 percent. Even half of all Democrats agreed.
Nothing even close to that has been seen since.
And, if you are looking for a time when the divide barely existed, you would have to go all the way back to when Dwight Eisenhower was president – when 79 percent of Republicans said government could be trusted, along with 71 percent of Democrats.
When public confidence is measured across all Americans regardless of party affiliation, we see a depressing low of only 15 percent (the lowest in six decades) who say they trusted the federal government to do what is right. That occurred during the Obama years and has risen only five points in this latest survey.
So, what can we conclude on the trust question? The first and most obvious answer is that, while we are notably divided, it’s been that way for a long time – not just since Trump was elected.
Secondly, Pew found that overall feelings toward the federal government have been steady in recent years, with current findings saying that 57 percent of us are “frustrated,” 24 percent “angry” and 18 percent “basically content.”
Regardless of the low trust numbers, strong majorities want government to play a major role in 10 areas the survey studied.
On the top of that list is “keeping the country safe from terrorism” – 91 percent of us identified that concern as the most important. It was followed by “responding to natural disasters,” “ensuring safe food and medicine,” “managing the U. S. immigration system,” and a tie for fifth place between “strengthening the economy” and “handling threats to public health.”
That would suggest the candidates who get our votes are the ones who come closest to meeting those challenges. Or will our partisan emotions instead of sober reflection prevail when we get the ballot in our hands?