Majority of Republican Voters Now Think Country is Going Wrong Way

“I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the worsening political discourse and, now, the disturbing assassinations,” 42-year-old Texas Republican Chris Bahr told the AP. “If you’d have talked to me two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have brought it up as a main concern but more of a gnawing feeling.… It’s something I’ve been thinking about. But now it’s violence, while before it was just this sense of animosity and division.”

The outlook is even worse for GOPers under 45, as 61 percent of them think this country is backsliding—a 30 percent increase since this June. And they have plenty of reasons to be. The cost of living is still high, inflation is not down, and the prices on everyday goods are likely to go up too. And nearly 75 percent of Republican women think they’ve lost their way, compared to 56 percent of Republican men. The conditions for a ballot box rebuke of the current GOP are fomenting.

“It’s like, you think you’re heading in the right direction with your career and your job, but everything around you is going up in price. It seems like you can’t catch a break,” 42-year-old truck driver Mustafa Robinson told AP. “But we are also supposed to be united as a country and coming together. And we are not. I’m so perplexed how we’re not on the same page about anything, so bad that these people are being shot.”