Americans agree 2020 was a bad year for the country

What you need to know:

• The number of Americans who believe the nation is “great” fell from 51% in 2017 to 37% as 2020 draws to a close.
• Compared to 2017, more Republicans now believe that the present moment represents the pinnacle of American greatness, while more Democrats now say that America was “never great.”
• On average, Americans believe that this was a very bad year for the nation, with Americans giving 2020 an average score of 3.4 out of 10 in terms of how it impacted the country.

Deep dive:

President Trump ran in 2016 on a campaign promise to “Make America Great Again.” Now, four years later, just how many Americans believe the United States is “great?”

Spoiler – just a minority, and fewer now than before. From 2017 to today, the number of Americans who rank the nation as an 8 to 10 on a 10-point scale of greatness has fallen from 51% to 37%.

Democrats and Independents drove the decline. The number of Democrats who see the country as “great” was more than halved from 2017 to 2020, while the number of Independents feeling this way dropped by 15 points.  Republicans, by contrast, are still much closer to where they were at the start of the Trump era.

 In another sign of Republican satisfaction with the current status quo, the number who identify the present day as the pinnacle of American greatness grew by 10 points from 2017 to the close of 2020.

By contrast, just 9% of Democrats see the current moment as the greatest point in American history. Instead, Democrats’ views of American greatness have dimmed over the past four years. Today, one in five Democrats believe that America “was never great” – an 8-point increase from 2017.

Coming off a year marked by protests against racially-based police violence and being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, 30% of Black Americans in 2020 agree that America was never great, up 10 points from 2017.

Overall, however, Americans continue to believe that the height of American greatness lies somewhere in the past. While the 1990s and 1980s garner a relatively strong ratio of adherents, a plurality (34% across partisan lines and the nation as a whole) see America’s peak as existing at some point from before the 1920s to the 1970s. Opinion is scattered as to which decade was particularly “great.”

As 2020 draws to a close, Americans show signs of ambivalence about how the year has affected them personally and considerable pessimism about how it has affected the nation. On a scale of 1 to 10, Americans give 2020 a 5.1 on how it has impacted their lives, but a 3.4 on how it has affected the country. While on the balance, Americans may feel middling about how 2020 has affected them personally, most can agree that 2020’s negative repercussions for the country as a whole were profound, underscoring that things may not feel "great" right now.