New poll shows Americans’ confidence in core US institutions is badly divided

New polling data has revealed that at a time of intense political polarisation, the American public are profoundly divided in their opinion of the country’s most important institutions.

According to the latest results from a Gallup tracking study, the public’s trust varies widely across different core institutions, with Democrats and Republicans holding very different ones high or low in their esteem.

Some of the differences are predictable: with Joe Biden in office, some 62 per cent of Democratic-leaning voters put their confidence in the presidency, as opposed to just 13 per cent of Republicans.

Conversely, a full 76 per cent of GOP-leaning respondents have confidence in the police, as opposed to 31 per cent of Democratic-inclined counterparts.

Democratic and Republican voters only come especially close to holding the same opinion on a handful of different institutions, convening in particular on the US Supreme Court, banks, the criminal justice system, and big business.

But on both sides of the divide, people hold all four of those institutions in mediocre to low esteem, with big business attracting the confidence of just 19 per cent of Democrats and 20 per cent of Republicans.

Held in particular contempt on both sides, perhaps unsurprisingly given its deadlock and partisan rancour, is the US Congress, which has ranked at the bottom of Gallup’s tracking list since 2007.

Only 17 per cent of Democrats have confidence in it, despite controlling both chambers – and on the Republican side, only 7 per cent are confident that their Congressional representatives will be able to do right by them.

The only institution Republicans rated lower was TV news, which won over only 6 per cent of them – and only 8 per cent said they had confidence in newspapers.

These rock-bottom ratings risk obscuring the overall picture painted by the study, which found that overall confidence in the 14 institutions it asked about in fact rose slightly during 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic, largely driven by the sharp increase in support for the medical system and public schools.

As the US returns to something like normal life, Gallup found, Americans’ levels of confidence in their core institutions seems to be reverting to the normal levels they’ve seen over recent years.