Welcome to The Lit from Meet the Press, I'm Carrie Dan. Here's something almost no one would deny. Winning feels good. Remember the last time your favorite team totally dominated their big rivals?
You know what it feels like to be crowned the chili cook-off champion at your company BBQ? Or just how much enjoyment you derived from humiliating your kind of jerky cousin on Family Scrabble Night? Even if you say you're not competitive, come on, we've all been there, feels good. The psychology of feeling like a winner is not lost on the President of the United States, who made this an unofficial motto of his 2020 campaign.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning, and you'll say please, please, it's too much winning. And of course the flip side to winning is losing, and President Trump also has a lot to say about that. I was searching his Twitter feed for the times he's called someone a loser on that platform, and let's just say I gave up after I hit 50 times. So who feels like they're winning and who feels like they're losing in American politics?
Thanks to the Pew Research Center, well, we got data for that. A new data release from Pew out today shows that among Republicans, 7 in 10, say their side has been winning lately on the political issues that matter to them. Among Democrats, 8 in 10, say they've been on the losing side. What's even more striking about all of this is how much of those numbers have changed since, you know, the President's election in 2016.
Less than four years ago, only about two out of 10 Republicans said they were winning. Now that's up almost 50 points. And among conservative Republicans, it's been even more dramatic, up nearly 60 points in just the last four years. Democrats are, well, I guess just more pessimistic about a lot of things overall, even back in 2016 before Trump's election, only about half thought they were winning on the issues.
Now, just 18% say the same thing, and that's even lower among progressives. Now, this data is as of January, so before the Democratic primary process started. But Democrats, even back then, were still pretty pessimistic about something else. Their chances of winning the White House.
Only 44% of Democrats thought their candidate will prevail in November, while nearly twice as many Republicans felt pretty good about Trump's reelection chances. Now, I'll note again that that was before the first three primaries, which maybe have prompted some of those respondents on both sides of the aisle to modify their assessments on that particular question. But of course, we've still got a ways to go on all of that. That's all for us.
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