What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls - Week Ending February 10, 2018

President Trump at week’s end was enjoying his best favorable ratings since early in his tenure in the White House, while Congress was off on a spending spree.

Since his January 30 State of the Union address, Trump’s approval ratings have been running slightly ahead of where Barack Obama was at this stage of his presidency. 

The latest Rasmussen Minute looks at the reaction to the president’s far-reaching State of the Union speech.

Most voters favor the immigration reform plan detailed by the president in the speech and think it’s likely to finally produce a secure southern border.

Congress Thursday night passed a two-year budget plan with billions of dollars in new domestic and defense spending. Senator Rand Paul was a lonely voice of dissent. When Trump first took office, over half of voters thought significant cuts in spending were likely, but that hope has been fading.

The stock market has been bouncing up and down in recent days, and 55% of Americans are concerned that the market bubble will burst, pushing the economy back into recession.

But economic and consumer confidence have jumped to four-year highs.

Forty-two percent (42%) of voters now say the country is headed in the right direction, the highest level of optimism since last April. This finding ran in the mid- to upper 20s for most of Obama’s last full year in office.

While the nation is better off economically than it has been in years, most voters see America as an increasingly divided land with worse still to come.

Thirty-four percent (34%) believe the FBI is more likely to have meddled in the 2016 election than the Russians. Fifty-five percent (55%) of Republicans feel that way.

Half of voters now think it’s likely that senior law enforcement officials broke the law in an effort to prevent Trump from winning the presidency. 

Twenty-five years after the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was enacted, most Americans support expanding it to include government-mandated paid family or medical leave for full-time workers.

Voters still give the health care they receive high marks but are more critical of the U.S. health care system than ever.

Russia has been banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics following exposure of a government-run program using performance enhancing drugs, but Americans don’t think they’re the only rule-breakers.

Still, 72% plan to tune in for at least some of the Winter Games coverage which officially kicked off yesterday in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

In other surveys last week: 

 -- The United States is expected to begin pulling troops out of Iraq after the government there declared victory over the radical Islamic State Group (ISIS), and more voters now agree that America  and its allies have won that war.

-- Several states are considering a law that would make an attack on law enforcement officers a hate crime, and most voters want to see a “Blue Lives Matter” law in their own state.

 -- Are Americans ready for topless beaches? Judges in at least two states are trying to decide.

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.