Republicans have become significantly more pessimistic about their children’s future since President Joe Biden entered the White House, according to a Pew survey released on Wednesday.
The change is particularly striking among conservative Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. In March 2020, 36% of that group said children in the United States would be worse off than their parents, a number that has shot up 40 percentage points to a current 76%.
But even among moderate GOP supporters, the change has been significant, with 70% currently saying children would be worse off than their parents after 52% thought so in March 2020.
The majority of Democrats are also pessimistic about the future of their children, although they have become more positive since Biden became president.
Among liberal Democrats last year, 76% said children would be worse off than their parents, a number which has dropped to a current 70%.
Moderate Democrats have had a similar dropoff in pessimism, from 66% last year to 58% now in the latest poll.
The survey showed that among the entire U.S. population, 68% believe their children will be worse off than their parents, which is higher than the median of 64% across all 17 countries included in the survey.
The survey also showed that Pew found that 71% of all U.S. adults consider the national economic situation to be bad, slightly up from 69% who said the same in the summer of 2020.
Newsweek pointed out that these negative attitudes come despite a U.S. economy showing signs of better health, with some 850,000 new jobs added last month and wages increasing 0.3%.
Even though the unemployment rate went up in June to 5.9%, it is still well below the coronavirus pandemic peak of 14.8% in April 2020.
Overall, the economy grew at a 6.4% rate in the first three months of this year, with experts predicting growth of up to 7% for the remainder of the year, which would be the strongest annual performance in some 70 years.
Pew's survey polled 18,850 adults across 17 "advanced economies" between February 1 and May 26, of which 2,596 were Americans, weighted to be representative of the national population. The margin of sampling error for the American respondents is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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