Poll: Quality Of Life For Americans Improved Under Barack Obama

A new poll found that, over the course of the last seven and a half years, quality of life has improved for many Americans.

Americans say they are “thriving” more now than they have in the nine years during which the survey tracked life satisfaction.

According to the Gallup poll released on Aug. 30, nearly four percent more Americans (55.4 percent) say they are “thriving,” rather than “struggling” or “suffering,” compared to the 51.6 percent who said the same in 2009, the year President Barack Obama took office.

In 2008, George W. Bush’s final year as president and the first year the poll began tracking quality of life, 48.9 percent of Americans said they were “thriving.”

Each major ethnic and racial group has higher reported numbers of those who are “thriving” since 2008, although not in equal measure. Between 2008 and 2010, African-American respondents reported that their life evaluations improved by 13 percent, putting them only behind Asians, 63.9 percent of whom said that they were “thriving” that year.

Since then, life evaluations for African-Americans has dropped significantly, with an average of 54 percent since 2013. Blacks now report the lowest life satisfaction among the four major racial demographics.

Gallup pollsters suggest the spike in life evaluations could relate to the U.S. electing its first black president, while the drop correlates with highly publicized police brutality against black individuals, and a widespread sentiment among the demographic that Obama has not done enough to improve African-American lives.

Approximately 71 percent of black Americans do not believe the government has done enough to help black people, according to a July Rasmussen Reports poll.

Asian-Americans consistently reported the highest degree of life satisfaction in the Gallup poll, with an all-time high of 63.9 percent in 2010 and 62.8 percent in 2016.

During the Great Recession, life satisfaction dropped collectively. Since then, it has improved the most for whites, having climbed from 51.8 percent in 2012 to 55.7 percent in 2016.

Sources: Gallup, Rasmussen Reports / Photo Credit: Pete Souza/The White House via Flickr