What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls - Week Ending May 6, 2017

The unemployment rate on Friday fell to a 10-year low, but Americans still suspect there’s more to be done.

College graduation season is upon us, but 71% think the new graduates will have a hard time finding a job. However, just 29% believe they have marketable skills.

Of course, it doesn’t help that many graduates are coming out of schools where Americans suspect free speech is a thing of the past. It’s tough to deal with challenges in the workplace if you can’t deal with challenges to your own opinions.

President Trump is proposing the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in decades. Voters agree cutting taxes is a good economic move but worry the president and Congress may cut too much.

The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. While voters tend to favor cutting it, they are evenly divided over Trump’s plan to cut the corporate tax rate by over half.

Voters are more receptive to the president’s proposal to kill the federal “death tax” and to eliminate most income tax deductions in exchange for a higher initial standard deduction. But they draw the line at ending all deductions in exchange for lower tax rates.

Trump earned a monthly job approval rating of 47% in April, down one point from March. At week’s end, his daily job approval stood at 46%.

One hundred days into Trump’s presidency, voters are almost evenly divided over whether they miss President Obama. Seventy-eight percent (78%) still think it’s likely that Trump will reverse or abolish most of Obama’s accomplishments.

The House on Thursday repealed and replaced some of the key provisions in Obamacare, although prospects for passage of the changes by the Senate are not good. Still, just 18% of voters want to leave the health care law as is. 

The federal government owns over one-quarter of the land in the United States, and Obama added a half-billion acres to that total in the closing days of his presidency. Trump is giving Obama’s last-minute land grab back. One-in-three voters (34%) think the government already owns too much land, while 18% say it doesn’t own enough.

Most voters don’t trust political polls and tend to think pollsters are out to block Trump’s agenda.

We told you last November that Real Clear Politics’ review of the findings of the top pollsters in the country showed that Rasmussen Reports called the 2016 presidential election right. Now another independent look at the highly criticized polling of the Trump-Clinton race, this time by the American Research Group, confirms that Rasmussen Reports was the most accurate pollster in the final survey before Election Day. 

Voter attitudes about pollsters parallel Rasmussen Reports’ findings over the years about the news media. Forty-four percent (44%) believe most reporters are trying to block Trump from passing his agenda. By comparison, 48% said most reporters were trying to help Obama pass his agenda in 2010.

The biggest story of Trump’s first 100 days as president may be the war he’s engaged in with what he calls the “fake media.” 

A plurality (44%) of voters continues to believe the average reporter is more liberal than they are. Just 17% say that reporter is more conservative, while 24% view the average reporter as about the same as themselves ideologically. These perceptions have changed little over the years.

Voters strongly consider North Korea a danger to the United States and tend to support the president’s tough response to that country’s aggressive nuclear weapons program.

Just 31% of Americans, however, think most of their fellow countrymen can locate North Korea on a map.

In other surveys last week:

-- Thirty-eight percent (38%) of voters say the United States is headed in the right direction.

-- Voters believe the nation’s stock of nuclear weapons is crucial to its national security and don’t want to reduce it.

-- The Kentucky Derby is scheduled to be run today, but most Americans aren’t planning to watch the famous horse race.

Visit the Rasmussen Reports home page for the latest current polling coverage of events in the news. The page is updated several times each day.

Remember, if it's in the news, it's in our polls.