Trump's Presidency Year: How Public Opinion Changed on Key Issues

45 th US President Donald Trump 30 January for the first time will deliver a speech before the general meeting of Congress. This speech is usually a summary of the work done and the voicing of plans for the future.

On the eve of the presidential speech Pew Research Center summed up the first year of Trump's work and formulated the following tasks for him, starting from the opinion of Americans.

1. Estimates by Americans of the economic conditions in the country are more positive than they have been in the past few years. In the October survey, 41% of Americans rated the economic conditions in the country as “excellent” or “good”; this is one of the highest positive rates in the past decade.

2. The public has mixed expectations regarding the recently adopted tax reform. Many US residents are confident that the new tax legislation will have a positive impact on them and their families (29%), but at the same time almost the same number of respondents expect the negative effect of the reform (27%); A third of US adults expect the law to have no tangible impact on their lives.

3. Nearly three-quarters of Americans (73%) called protection against terrorism the main task for Trump and Congress. American views on the campaign against the terrorist organization ISIS have improved dramatically: in the fall of 2017, most Americans (55%) announced for the first time that the campaign was going well compared to 31% who had approved the campaign a year earlier.

4. Opinions of Americans at the expense of US foreign policy are divided. According to a survey conducted in July 2017, Americans are evenly divided about whether the US should be “active in world affairs” or the country should “pay less attention to problems abroad and focus on problems within the state” (47%). The proportion of respondents supporting active global participation of the United States increased from 35% in 2014.

5. The public perception of immigrants in the past few years has become more positive. Most Americans believe that immigrants make the US stronger (65%). The public has clearly expressed views on two issues that are central to the current immigration debate in Congress: 74% of respondents support the granting of permanent legal status to immigrants brought to the US illegally in childhood; 37% of respondents would like to construct a wall along the US-Mexico border.

6. Americans generally have a positive view of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Most respondents (56%) believe that the agreement has a positive impact on the United States. But Republicans more often than Democrats criticize this treaty and call it negative for the United States. (54% vs. 18%), believing that the agreement benefits Mexico more than the United States.

7. Americans believe that Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act has a positive effect on American society. Despite repeated attempts by Republicans to repeal the law on health care adopted in 2010, most Americans believe that the law has a positive rather than negative impact on US residents (44% versus 35%).

8. Half of Americans believe that government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest.while 45% say it usually does more harm than good. Democratic support for state regulation of business is now higher than for most of the 1990's and 2000's. As of July 2017, two thirds of Democrats believed that government regulation was necessary to protect the public interest, while only 31% of Republicans agreed with this opinion.

9. Opinion on the importance of combating climate change in the United States is associated with party sympathies. Nearly seven out of ten Democrats (68%) believe that combating climate change should be the top priority of Tampa’s policy and Congress in 2018, which is 50 percentage points higher than the percentage of Republicans sharing this opinion (18%). 81% of Democrats are confident that environmental protection should be on the list of top priorities of American policy, only 37% of Republicans share their opinion.

10. Six out of ten Americans believe that Trump’s election as president has worsened interracial relations in the United States. Three out of ten believe that this had no effect on relations between members of different races, and only 8% said that his election improved these relations. Opinions about the general state of race relations in the country remain more negative than positive: only 38% of respondents believe that race relations in the United States are generally good, and 56% of respondents are confident that these relationships are generally bad.

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