Survey: Both sides feel like losers in politics

WASHINGTON — Nearly a year after the election of a president who promised Americans would win so much they would grow “tired of winning,” a funny thing has happened in American politics — both sides think they’re losing.

That lose-lose mood, which is on display daily on Capitol Hill, is strongly reinforced by a study of public opinion released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. More than 6 in 10 Americans say they believe their side is losing more than it’s winning on the issues that matter most; only about 1 in 4 think their side is mostly winning.

That attitude might not be surprising from Democrats, who, with the election, lost control of all three branches of the federal government. More strikingly, Republicans, too, think they’re getting the short end of the stick.

The Pew study is the latest in a series the research group has done for the past three decades using people’s answers to a battery of questions to group them into clusters according to political views. This year’s study produced eight such political groupings — four mostly Republican and four mostly Democratic — plus a ninth category of about 8 percent of the public who are primarily bystanders to America’s political debate.

Of the eight groups who do have opinions about politics, none has a majority who think their side is winning; only one has even a plurality who feel that way.

Among Democrats, that sense of loss undergirds the rage many feel as they see policies adopted under President Barack Obama — or previous presidents — rolled back under President Donald Trump.

On the GOP side, the belief that their side is losing, despite holding a majority in both houses of Congress, fuels conservative challenges to Republican incumbents and efforts to overthrow party leaders.

In addition to the question about winning, the pessimistic view jumps out from a question about whether life for the next generation of Americans will be better or worse than life today. Overall, 48 percent of those surveyed said worse, compared with 29 percent who said life would be better, continuing a downbeat view of America’s future that has dominated U.S. public opinion for more than a decade.

The two largest groups in Pew’s political typology — core conservatives and solid liberals — have fairly similar levels of pessimism about the next generation’s prospects, albeit for different reasons.