Nearly 1 in 3 Americans say there's no good choice for president in 2016


American voters are unusually pessimistic about the chance of getting a good president out of this cycle's crop of candidates. New Gallup poll results find nearly one in three Americans say no one running should be in the Oval Office, while 66 percent report they see at least one plausible choice.
What makes these numbers unusual is that this isn't an incumbent cycle, and clean slate elections usually see Americans more optimistic. In 2008, for instance, 84 percent said there was at least one suitable candidate running, and 75 percent said the same in 2000.
The same poll found that just 37 percent of Americans think the presidential election process is working the way it's supposed to, with confidence in the process dropping significantly since 2008 and slightly since 2012.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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