Donald Trump loves appealing to American insecurities about China—in his speeches, it’s our chief economic antagonist, the country that has sucked away our manufacturing jobs by outwitting the oafs we sent to Washington on trade. This has seemed like a fairly savvy electoral strategy, given voters’ post-recession anxieties about the United States’ place in the world.
But Trump’s pessimism is starting to look a little out of step with the public mood. For the first time since the Great Recession, more than half of Americans now say the U.S. is “the world’s leading economic power,” according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center. Only about one-third say its China.
Pew’s findings clash somewhat with results of a similar survey that Gallup released in February; that poll found that 37 percent of Americans thought the U.S. was the world’s leading economic power, compared with half who said China. Still, even those numbers represented an improvement in Americans’ self image compared with 2014, when just 31 percent said we were top of the heap. (Another 5 percent, who appear to have just woken up from a nap that began in 1988, answered Japan).
Gallup also found that Americans have become more optimistic about their future position; 44 percent said the U.S. would be the leading economic power in 20 years, compared with 38 percent who felt that way in 2012. Just 34 percent thought China would be the leading nation two decades from now.
Of course, the phrase “world’s leading economic power” leaves lots of room for interpretation. Does it mean the largest economy by GDP? In that case, China may already have pulled ahead, depending on how you measure. On the other hand, if it means richest nation per capita, then the People’s Republic still has a long, long, long way to go. And if the designation is meant to signify some fuzzy combination of large and rich, then the U.S. still isn’t about to be knocked off its perch any time soon. But in the end, I think it’s fair to interpret these poll results mostly as a barometer of American confidence. In which case, they say a few things:
1) There is obviously a large fraction of the country that is ready to believe China has been “taking us to the cleaners,” as Trump puts it, and is probably going to be receptive to his message.
2) That faction probably isn’t a majority, judging by Pew’s results and Gallup’s question on the world 20-years hence.
3) Regardless of which poll you believe, Americans have been getting less pessimistic about their country’s global stature as the U.S. economy has healed. And that bodes poorly for Trump, who is counting on a pervasive sense of fear and loss to put him in the White House.
