Voter skepticism of politicians remains high, according to a new survey released Friday yet President Donald J. Trump gets high marks for keeping the promises he made in his first run for the White House. According to a new Rasmussen Reports poll, nearly half of all voters believe he “has delivered more than most” on the pledges he made in 2016.- Advertisement –
The survey, conducted by telephone and online, found general disappointment widespread with elected officials when it came to them doing what they said they would do when running for office. Just 16 percent of those surveyed viewed successful candidates as promise keepers while a whopping 70 percent said they were not with the remaining 14 percent undecided on the question.
Rasmussen Reports called the results “a noticeable improvement” over voters’ response to the question in previous years. In November 2009, the first year the question was posed, only 4 percent of those surveyed said winning politicians “kept their campaign promises.”
Trump fares better than most in this latest poll. Of the voters who participated, 45 percent said they believed he “has kept his campaign promise more than most presidents,” up from 38 percent in a March 2018 survey.
Unsurprisingly, Democrats were more critical of Trump than Republicans, with 66 percent saying Trump had kept his promises “less than most presidents” while 68 percent of Republicans said he’d kept them more. Nearly half of the unaffiliated voters in the survey, 47 percent, sided with the GOP.
Overall, Democrats are “a lot more likely” than either Republicans or independents to believe politicians follow through on their campaign commitments after they are elected. Just 14 percent of those in the GOP and 9 percent of unaffiliated voters believe most politicians can be counted on to govern on the platform they ran on compared to 23 percent of Democrats who agreed with the statement.
The lack of confidence the American electorate has in Washington is probably explained to a considerable degree by these numbers. Neither party finds the political class trustworthy.
The results should be a boon for Trump who, according to every recent national survey, is trailing Joe Biden by as much as double-digits in their battle for the presidency. In his speech accepting his party’s nomination Thursday night, the former vice president seems to say repeatedly he wanted voters to base their vote on how they felt about the character of the men running for the nation’s highest office.
In a contest of competence versus character, a theme likely to underscore the GOP fall campaign, Trump may have a narrow lead. Among voters who think most politicians don’t keep their campaign promises, 48 percent said “Trump is doing better than most presidents” while 38 percent disagreed.
The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted August 18-19, 2020 by Rasmussen Reports and has a +/- 3 percent sampling error at a 95 percent level of confidence.