Two in 3 voters say the country is “on the wrong track” because voters think Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump could turn it around for the better less than two months from Election Day.
The latest NBC News national survey 65% of registered voters polled this month said the country was on the wrong track, while 28% said it was on the right track.
The number is one of the “warning signs” for Democrats ahead of November, said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, a pollster, along with GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies.
“For the first time since September 2022, the wrong-way data is now below 70%, but it is still at an appalling 65% for the party in power,” Horwitt said. “In this regard, the cost of living remains a dominant issue, with the share of voters saying their family incomes are lagging behind is the highest we’ve recorded at 66%.”
Opinions about the country’s direction fall along party lines, with 92% of Republicans saying the country is headed in the wrong direction, compared to 36% of Democrats and 70% of independents.
McInturff cited pessimism about the country’s direction as one of the factors explaining the relatively low level of enthusiasm for the election. To rate their interest in the election from 1 to 10, 65% rated themselves as 10 or “very interested” in the election. That’s a 10-point drop from the same point in the 2020 election.
NBC News polls have found consistently high rates of voters saying the country has been on the wrong track for years — and especially Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. And that pessimism has created a problem for the party that controls the White House. In the four elections since 1992, when the president’s party lost the White House, an average of 66% of voters said the country was on the wrong track, according to an NBC News poll.
Harris is not the current president, but he is part of the current administration. When voters were asked which candidate best represented change, he had the edge over Trump, with 47% saying Harris and 38% saying Trump.
The national NBC News poll of 1,000 registered voters — 870 of whom were reached by cellphone — was conducted Sept. 13-17 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.