Americans are more hopeful that the United States will be better under President-elect Donald Trump in 2017 than it was in 2016 under President Barack Obama, a new Associated Press-Times Square Alliance poll reveals.
According to the poll, released Monday, 55 percent of Americans think that 2017 will be better than 2016, which is a 12-point increase compared to the same poll taken last year.
Republicans are more likely to feel optimistic about 2017, given that their candidate won the presidential election last month, while Democrats are not as likely to be optimistic about 2017, the poll found.
"Next year will be better than this year, because people will have more jobs and they'll have more money to spend," Bourema Tamboura, a Harlem resident behind the wheel of a New York car service, told the Associated Press.
Still, only 18 percent of Americans polled said they think 2016 was better than 2015, while 33 percent thought it was worse under Obama's watch. Forty-seven percent said they didn't think it was better or worse.
Trump's winning election was also thought to be the most important news event of 2016, the poll's respondents said. Other important news included mass shootings at the hands of terrorists, terrorist attacks and the death of black people at the hands of police officers.
The AP-Times Square Alliance Poll of 1,007 adults was conducted online Dec. 9-11, using a sample drawn from GfK's probability-based KnowledgePanel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
