The majority of people asked in a new Post-Standard/Siena poll believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.
View full sizeJim Southard, a retired electrician who lives in Brewerton, is a Democrat who believes the country is headed in the right direction. Syracuse, NY -- Cynthia Vales and James Southard are both worried about the economy, health care reform and government spending. But their views about how to tackle those issues — and their faith in the federal government to do it right — are worlds apart.
Vales, 56, a math teacher from Camillus, sides with the majority in a new Post-Standard/Siena College poll who say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. She doesn’t trust what she sees as “rash” decisions on health care and other areas by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.
“I’m not comfortable with how the country is moving in such a quick way in certain directions,” she said. “I don’t think they have been thought out carefully.”
Southard, 66, a retired electrician from Brewerton, aligns with the minority who say the country is on the right track. “We finally got health insurance,” he said. “It was super-needed. I’m old, so I’m on Medicare anyway. But I don’t want to see other people denied health coverage because they’re poor.”
The poll of 623 likely voters in the 25th Congressional District, which covers Onondaga and Wayne counties and parts of Cayuga and Monroe, found that 57 percent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, while 33 percent think it is on the right track.
The question of whether the country is on the right track has been included in polls for decades. Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, says the question is a “general barometer” of the mood of the country — and the incumbent party’s prospects in an upcoming election.
If that is the case, the results of this poll — and of recent polls across the country — do not bode well for the Democrats.
A national poll taken last month by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed similar results to the Post-Standard/Siena survey. It found that 32 percent of adults said the country is headed in the right direction while 59 percent said it is on the wrong track.
While such deep pessimism could be poison to incumbents, it is hardly unprecedented. In December 2008, at the tail end of the George W. Bush administration, only 26 percent of adults said the country was headed in the right direction. That number jumped to 43 percent under President Barack Obama in April 2009, but it has headed gradually downward ever since.
The last time the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed more than half of Americans saying the country was moving in the right direction was in December 2003. The highest point in the past decade was in the period of national unity following the terror attacks in September 2001, when 72 percent said the nation was moving in the right direction. Another high point was in April 2003 — just after the invasion of Iraq.
Peter Horwitt, senior research analyst at Hart Research Associates of Washington, D.C., which helps produce the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, said the “right direction” question generally reflects the health of the economy and the president’s popularity. But over the past decade, he said, it also has shown a growing divide between Democrats and Republicans.
View full sizeCynthia Vales Vales, a math teacher from Camillus, sides with the majority in a new Post-Standard/Siena College poll who say the United States is headed in the wrong direction.In the Post-Standard/Siena poll, 52 percent of Democrats said the nation is on the right track, while only 14 percent of Republicans said so. Significantly, only 35 percent of independent voters said the country is on the right track, with 56 percent going the other way. The poll, which was conducted Sunday through Tuesday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Some of the “wrong-direction” respondents were clearly angry. Mike Cole, 36, a computer technician from Fayetteville, said he is “furious” about the way Obama and the Democrats are running the country — from the $787 billion economic stimulus package that he says has not created sufficient jobs to the health care bill that requires Americans to buy insurance.
“It’s a very simple case of don’t put government where it doesn’t belong, because it will always screw it up,” he said. Cole said he is also angry at what he sees as Obama’s weak foreign policy. “He is intentionally bringing the country to its knees,” he said.
Linda Wilcox, 61, a retired 911 dispatcher from Marietta, agrees, saying Obama has been “kowtowing” to other countries and spending too freely at home. She is an independent voter who has donated to tea party candidates. “I feel that we’re overspending,” she said. “We’re being overtaxed. The government is getting into many things it has no business getting into, like health care.”
Reeher, the political science professor, said the declining number of people who think the country is on the right track is an indication that more Americans are tying the weak economy to Obama rather than assigning all the blame to his predecessor.
That disappointment is echoed by Mark Porter, 40, a social worker from Radisson who voted for the president two years ago. “I feel that he’s doing a little bit, but not as much as I was hoping,” he said. “It’s been two years now, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”
Porter told pollsters the country is moving in the wrong direction, but later amended that. Although he strongly opposes spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he thinks Obama is on the right track with his economic stimulus and jobs programs. “It’s slowly getting better, but like I said, slowly,” he said.
Southard blames that slow pace on the Republicans in the Senate, who he says are blocking progress. “We need government to regulate some stuff so we don’t have the businesses just running wild and doing what they want to do. ...” he said. “We’re finally going to have some regulation in the banking industry, which brought us to our knees. My annuity plan and all that turned into crap.”
Vales fears that all the spending on the stimulus, the health care bill and other initiatives is just making things worse. She went to a tea party rally in Syracuse last spring, and she liked what she saw.
“I thought that really there was nothing we could do or say about what was happening with the country,” she said. “And when the tea party started I thought it was truly amazing, because here’s a group of people who are actually making a difference ... It’s a down-to-roots group that’s actually turning the wheel a little at a time the way I think it should be turned.”
That turn away from excessive borrowing and spending cannot come quickly enough for Vales.
“Down at the level where I am — and I have to get up and go to work every day — I can’t keep borrowing money to make my household work,” she said. “Somewhere I have to cut back and I have to make allowances. ... There are so many people losing their jobs and their houses. It’s the middle class that carries this country, and if you break the middle class, it’s going to be really hard to repair.”
Contact Paul Riede at priede@syracuse.com or 470-3206.