Over the last year, polls have emerged showing that Americans–and the Millennial generation in particular–have lost their trust in government. This month a new poll of Republicans shows a continuation of that trend.
A new Fox News poll finds that trust in government is down 44 percent over the last ten years among Republicans. But even among Democrats, Obama has also lost marks for openness and transparency, something echoed in other polls, as well.
When this poll was first conducted in 2002, 63 percent of Republican voters still had trust in government. By 2009 only 32 percent of Republicans said they trusted government. That number has now tumbled to a mere 19 percent today.
Maybe not surprisingly, Democrat respondents are closer today to where they stood in 2002 than are Republican respondents. During the Bush years in 2002, 43 percent of Democrats said they still had trust in government. By 2009, after Obama was elected, that level had risen to 53 percent. Today it stands at 55 percent. With only a two percent rise as the Obama era begins to wind down, that does not show much gain for all the President’s big government efforts.
Independent voters were far less sanguine than democrats. “For independents, trust was 53 percent in 2002, 35 percent in 2009 and 31 percent now,” the poll reported.
In another bad sign for Obama, voters are not satisfied with his promises to institute a more open and ethical administration than past presidents.
“Only about a quarter of voters think the Obama administration has lived up to the promise of being the most transparent White House in history,” Fox reported on May 15.
A third of voters (34 percent) feel that Obama’s regime has been less open and transparent than even the Bush White House while 38 percent feel that he has not improved at all and openness and transparency is “about the same” as when he took office even though he campaigned on having the most open and ethical administration ever.
This new poll also tracks well with several other recent polls.
In June of last year, Rasmussen found that only 30 percent trusted government to abide by the Constitution in the execution of its duties.
By March of this year, Pew Research found that the Millennial generation’s trust in government was down 15 points from 2009.
The following month a Harvard poll found that the Millennials had a lower level of trust in government than any previous generation on record.
This is all bad news for a President who said last year that if “people can’t trust” government, then “we’re going to have some problems, here.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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