Opinion: Why everyone agrees that America is on ‘the wrong track’ – By Hayes Brown (MSNBC) / January 31, 2022
An NBC News poll shows Americans are pessimistic — but they can’t agree what the right direction looks like.
Americans aren’t happy with the way things are going in this country. That’s according to the most recent NBC News poll, released last week, which found that 72 percent of respondents believe that “things are off on the right track.” Only 22 percent answered that things are “headed in the right direction.”
There is no real consensus anymore on what the “right track” is.
That pretty closely mirrors Gallup, which asked if respondents were “satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going.” Last December, the polling group found that 21 percent of Americans were satisfied, with 79 percent saying they were dissatisfied. That’s the kind of number that gets circulated around Washington as an argument against the ruling party’s agenda. And it will surely be called a death knell for Democrats ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
But here’s the thing about both polls: They ask the wrong questions. There is no real consensus anymore on what the “right track” is. Accordingly, we get a political Rorschach test onto which partisans can project their perspectives.
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