Rasmussen: Majority Believe US Headed In Wrong Direction

Twenty-eight percent of Likely U.S. Voters now say the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

That's down four points from 32 percent the week before which marked the highest level of optimism since early March.

From July 25 through December 11 of last year, the number of voters who were confident in the nation's current course resembled levels measured in the final months of the George W. Bush administration, remaining in the narrow range of 14 percent to 19 percent. That finding began climbing in early January of this year to a high of 34 percent in the second week of February and has been in the high 20s to low 30s in weekly tracking ever since.

When President Barack Obama assumed office in January 2009, voter optimism rose to 27 percent, then climbed into the 30s, peaking at 40 percent in early May of that year. In 2010, confidence steadily decreased.

Sixty-five percent of voters continue to think the country is heading down the wrong track, up three points from a week ago. Since January 2009, the level of voter pessimism about the nation’s course has ranged from a low of 57 percent to a high of 80 percent, but it has generally been in the low to mid-60s this year.

Ninety-one percent of Republicans and 72 percent of voters not affiliated with either major political party continue to believe the country is heading down the wrong track. Fifty-four percent of Democrats think the country is heading in the right direction, but 34 percent of voters in the president's party think the country is on the wrong track.

Fifty-eight percent of black voters think the country is going in the right direction. Most whites (71 percent) and voters of other races (63 percent) do not.

Voters who have served in the military are slightly more pessimistic than those who have not been in uniform.

Confidence in how the United States is doing in the War on Terror has fallen to its lowest level this year.

The national telephone survey of 3,500 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports July 9-15, 2012. The margin of sampling error for the survey is plus or minus 2 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.