Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day for May 3, 2017
The Number of the Day columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.
May 3, 2017: In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected as president in a landslide victory, and 52 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. That level of trust was down dramatically from 77 percent just eight years earlier—and it was destined to keep falling.
Other than a brief blip following 9/11, a majority of Americans have never again trusted the federal government to do the right thing even most of the time.[1] As a result, it’s been 45 years since trusting the federal government was the norm. The vast majority of Americans alive today cannot remember such a time.
| The lack of even minimal trust raises troubling questions in a nation founded on a belief that the only legitimate source of authority for a government is the consent of the governed. |
The lack of even minimal trust raises troubling questions in a nation founded on a belief that the only legitimate source of authority for a government is the consent of the governed.
Significantly, this decline in trust applies only to the federal government. State and local governments retain much higher levels of trust and approval and have seen little change over the years.[2]
Back in the 1960s and '70s, trust initially declined due to presidential deceptions about Vietnam and Watergate. Lyndon Johnson dropped out of his race for re-election, and Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace due to presidential deceptions and scandals. But trust in the federal government never recovered—it kept falling even as memories of Johnson and Nixon recede further into the past. Over the past decade, the number of citizens trusting the federal government to do the right thing most of the time has fallen to 25 percent or less.
In my forthcoming book, Politics Has Failed: America Will Not, I make the case that the ongoing distrust of the federal government is directly related to the growth of the Regulatory State. As noted in earlier Numbers of the Day, the number of regulators and regulatory budgets have grown in size enormously over the past four decades.
The book is scheduled for release on Tuesday, May 9.
- May 2, 2017 97 percent of women who strongly supported Trump in 2016 satisfied with job he's doing
- May 1, 2017 6.5 billion dollars spent on the 2016 election
- April 28, 2017 90 percent of Internet publishing employees work in counties won by Hillary Clinton
- April 27, 2017 $184 billion: value of volunteer work in America
- April 26, 2017 519,000 elected officials in America, serving 87,576 governing bodies
- To see other recent numbers, check out the archive.
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