Most major news organisations in the US have a poll going
into the election year.
Most of those polls, however, are
what we call horse race polls.
Who's up, who's down, the candidates
compared against each other.
We at FT felt that we should do something slightly different,
particularly since one of the things President Trump has
constantly said, is his case for re-election is
built on his economic record.
We felt we wanted to see whether the American people agreed
and whether they thought his economic record
and his economic policies were actually making them better off
than they were four years ago, in that famous Ronald Reagan
question that he asked in 1980.
So we asked 1,000 voters: do they
feel better off than they were four years ago?
And the answer, frankly, came back as a surprise to us.
Two-thirds of the respondents said they weren't better off.
Now this comes despite the fact that we have market records
in the financial markets.
We have an economic expansion that is at record levels
as well.
And I think what that shows us is the dynamic that happened
in 2016, where you had a lot of working-class and middle-class
voters who were very angry, because expansion hasn't gotten
to them yet, that dynamic hasn't changed just because Donald
Trump is president.
And I think, frankly, that is problematic for Donald Trump.
If, indeed, as we've seen on Twitter and recent rallies,
he is trying to convince those voters to support him again,
and they don't feel that his policies have helped them yet,
that could really hinder the president's ability
to make the argument to re-elect him in 2020.
Why people feel they're not better off.
The number-one reason is wages, wages and income.
Now, we've seen this borne out, again, in the data.
Just on last week, we saw that the US jobs report for October
showed that wages, although growing slightly,
are nowhere near the growth levels they were pre-crisis.
So the whole big market boom, the whole big economic boom,
has not filtered down yet to your hourly wages
that affects your working-class and middle-class voter.
Number two was level of debt, both for personal and family.
So what you're seeing is a lot of credit-card debt,
a lot of student debt, a lot of auto debt.
Again, things that precipitated the crisis 10 years ago.
A lot of families are feeling overburdened,
and they're worried about things like the trade war, which
was interesting to us, also.
The number one thing they're worried about
is trade tensions with China, with Mexico, with the US's
biggest trading partners.
But also, number two is because of healthcare costs.
You have a combination of worries
about their personal debt and worries about healthcare costs.
And you've seen the Democrats really hammer on that.
That helped them in the midterms of 2018.
They focused very much on healthcare costs
and how that's impacting middle-class voters.
And you're seeing it again in the Democratic primaries,
really hammering this issue of healthcare
and pushing a Medicaid for All because of that issue.
So one of the other things we decided to do with this poll,
is we're going to track every month up until election day
whether voters think they're better off than they
were four years ago.
But we also wanted to take a snapshot
on particular issues that are affecting voters
at that moment in time.
The one we asked for this month's poll
is, how concerned are you about violence in the Middle East,
and to what extent should the Trump administration
take rising oil prices into consideration
when they decide whether to engage in hostilities with Iran
or other belligerents in the region?
And surprisingly, to me at least,
we saw 55 per cent of Americans said, yes, you should take this
into consideration.
And that is very interesting to watch,
as the president has really gone back and forth
on the extent to which he wants to deploy
US forces in the region, and the extent to which he wants
to particularly confront Iran.
Remember, John Bolton, national security adviser,
who was very adamant, very hard-line towards Iran,
wanting to actually launch hostilities and counterbalance
Iran through the use of military force.
He was basically pushed out, because Donald Trump disagreed
with him.
And to a certain extent, that is because Trump
is very worried about his domestic economic record,
again, when he goes for re-election.