Republicans are increasingly happy with the federal government

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published 8 October 2018

The Republican Party has long cast itself as a bulwark protecting "real America" against Washingtonian overreach — in recent years, think the Tea Party or President Trump's pledge to "drain the swamp" — but new Gallup poll results published Monday show the GOP is rapidly embracing the federal government.

This time last year, just 47 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents told Gallup they were satisfied with "the way the nation is being governed." This year, that figure has surged to 72 percent.

Unsurprisingly, satisfaction with governance is markedly partisan. Just 10 percent of Democrats have expressed this satisfaction since Trump took office, and Republican satisfaction hovered at a similar level throughout former President Barack Obama's tenure. However, the divergence was not so dramatic during the early years of the George W. Bush administration; in 2001 and 2002, Democrats' satisfaction was in the 40s, only about 40 percentage points lower than Republicans' record high of 82 percent.

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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.