Americans remain optimistic about the country’s ability to harness innovation and think it should be easier to build things in America, while they’re also skeptical about the government’s role in solving the issues confronting the nation, a new survey finds.
The findings of the Ronald Reagan Institute’s Reagan National Economic Survey, reviewed exclusively by FOX Business, showed that 65% of registered voters were optimistic about American-led innovation in areas like medicine, energy and artificial intelligence (AI) – including 81% of Republicans, 59% of Democrats and 57% of Independents.
“Americans are really optimistic about our future, which isn’t something that you would get just by looking at the media and kind of day-to-day portrayals of where Americans are,” Dan Rothschild, director of the Center for Civics, Education, and Opportunity at the Reagan Institute, told FOX Business.
“Members of Gen Z in particular have a 50-point net positive rating on the ability of American science and technology to build a better future. For a generation that’s widely described as being pessimistic, I thought that was a really stark finding,” he added.
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The survey asked Americans if they think it’s too hard, too easy or about right in terms of the difficulty of building housing, roads and highways, and factories in their communities – with respondents saying it’s generally either too hard or about right.
In terms of housing, the survey found that 54% think it’s too hard to build homes versus 36% who said it’s about right, with 9% saying it’s too easy.
The share of voters saying the difficulty is about right for building new roads and highways (48%) narrowly outpaced those saying it’s too hard (44%), and was well above the 8% who said it’s too easy. A similar pattern played out for factories, with 45% saying the ease of building was about right, while 43% said it’s too hard and 11% said it’s too easy.
“I was positively impressed by how much Americans want to build,” Rothschild said. “The vast majority of Americans believe that it is either too hard to build one or more of those types of facilities or that it’s just about right. Nobody believes, effectively, that we’re building too much.”
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The survey also asked Americans about their views regarding former President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies as commander-in-chief, finding a strong plurality believes his policies were generally positive for the country. It found that 47% of respondents said Reagan’s policies were good for America, versus 31% who said they weren’t.
There was a notable partisan split on the question, with Republicans favoring Reagan’s policies good for the country by a 78% to 4% margin. Independents generally agreed, albeit by a smaller margin of 42% to 32%.
A majority of Democrats took the opposite view, with 52% saying his policies were bad for America and 24% saying they were good for the country.
“You’ve got a loud group, mostly online, saying that President Reagan’s economic projects were bad for America, that we need to reject so-called ‘zombie Reaganism.’ We find basically no data that there’s a group of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters that believe this,” Rothschild said.
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Voters were also asked whether they agree with Reagan’s statement from his first inaugural address that, “In our present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
The question found broad agreement among Americans, with 81% of registered voters saying they think that statement is true today. That figure includes 93% of Republicans, 82% of Independents and 69% of Democrats.
“It probably means different things to different respondents and different voters. But I take away from it that it’s a vote of confidence in the American people, in American business, in American civic society – and not a vote of confidence in politicians to fix what’s wrong with America,” Rothschild said.
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