A Mini Poll on the Obama Legacy

Traditionally every American president spends his last months in office working on his legacy--how he wants to be remembered and for what. The result of his effort, how he is actually remembered, is not determined until years later. This is legacy as we now know it: FDR is remembered for ending the Great Depression, Truman is remembered for ending WWII via Hiroshima, and Reagan is remembered for ending the USSR.  Another way of viewing a president’s legacy  is to see how Americans today view the  future that he is leaving them in both personal and national terms.

 What this means is that we don’t have to wait on “posterity” before considering the legacy   of President Obama. The Obama legacy can be found in the impact on that his presidency has had on the attitudes of the people and this can be spelled out right now. One way of doing this would be to spend thousands of dollars to have a professional polling firm develop questions and supervise interviewers who ask them of a scientifically drawn sample that represents the opinions of the nation. If you can’t spare the thousands however, you could write your own questions and have an internet pollster select, contact and quiz say, 100 respondents for a couple hundred bucks. What you get is a survey, but a Gallup or Pew survey it is not. What you get is a Mini Poll. This peep at the Obama legacy is based on a Mini Poll of the attitudes of 100 respondents who were contacted and quizzed over the Internet. The inquiry included hypothetical statements requiring an “Agree” or “Disagree” response and results from incomplete sentences designed to identify their states of mind.

The Image of the Future and Obama’s Legacy

Legacy is the glue that holds society together by its connection to the past, the present and the future. We spend the first years of our lives absorbing the stories  of the accomplishments of those who lived before us. We spend our middle years creating the stories of our own accomplishments intended to be added to the current storehouse of human knowledge. Near the end of our lives we confront the need to take stock of our contributions during our time and initiate action to influence the way we are remembered when we have passed on. Flippantly speaking, we all try to mess with mortality by living forever (though in the hearts and minds of those we leave behind.)

The Image of the Future and Obama’s Legacy

Legacy is the glue that holds society together by its connection to the past, the present and the future. We spend the first years of our lives absorbing the stories  of the accomplishments of those who lived before us. We spend our middle years creating the stories of our own accomplishments intended to be added to the current storehouse of human knowledge. Near the end of our lives we confront the need to take stock of our contributions during our time and initiate action to influence the way we are remembered when we have passed on. Flippantly speaking, we all try to mess with mortality by living forever (though in the hearts and minds of those we leave behind.)

Legacy is the remembrance of the stories of the past and present projected into the future of forever. Our beliefs about the future are crucially relevant to the creation of a legacy. Since we cannot study the future which does not exist, ever, we study beliefs about it as they exist in the hearts and minds of those we who will hopefully live through the present-future timeframe.

It was with this in mind that we placed the Obama Presidency as the stimulus in the minds of our panelists and recorded their responses about their images of the future. One inquiry we made was:

Because of the impact of the Obama Presidency the future of America is …

The open-endedness of the question gave the participants an infinite range of ways to respond. Yet the words they most frequently used in their answers were “better”   (15 times) or “worse” (5 times). In their responses where they referred to the idea of “better” or “worse” without using the exact words, we added those to the “better” and “worse” categories in the table below.

                        Obama Impact on America’s Future

                        Better Future                         37

                        Worse Future                         37

                        Same Future                           11

                        Other Responses                        8

                        “I don’t know”                            7

More than two-thirds of the respondents saw the impact of the Obama Presidency on America’s future in making it “Better” or making it “Worse.”  And most notably they divided their responses 37 to 37--right down the middle.  Those in the “Better” group said, for example,  said that the future is “much more hopeful,” “better than it was when George Bush left office,” “greater with more possibilities” or simply that “it’s gonna be better.” Those with the opposite view saw the country’s future   as “declining,” ” going in the wrong direction,” “frightening and unsure,”” more division of the races,” “ and “more hateful than ever.” Those who did not see the country’s future as either “Better” or “Worse” saw it as  “same as before,” “more or less the same,”  “unchanged,” or ( if “Don’t know,”)  “who knows?”  “Only God knows the answer to that.”

Because of the impact of the Obama Presidency my personal future in this country is ,,,

This question was asked to check the reliability of the other responses when asked about the nation’s future. Their willingness to see the future of the country and their own futures as one, more or less, signifies the degree to which they were  “owning” their first opinions.

The responses to the “personal futures” inquiry were subjected to the same analysis as when asked about the nation’s future. The results are shown below.

                        Obama Impact on Personal Futures

                        Better Future                         31

                        Worse Future                         31

                        Same Future                           19

                        “Don’t Know”                          10

                        Other Responses                       9

                       

Almost two-thirds of the respondents saw their future as either becoming “better” for them personally, or becoming “worse.” Those who thought their futures would be “better” said “because of Obama  [my  personal future] “will be looking bright,” “taking a bigger role in equality and  bettering the human condition,””better than  it was under Bush,’ [it will] “include healthcare outside the county ER.” Those who saw their future as  in “worse “  said the future was “worst than it could have been,”  “dismal—can’t see it improve unless we change directions in many areas,”  “precarious,” “declining” and “fearful.”  A fifth of the respondents saw the “Same Future,” saying it was neither better nor worse because “the most important aspects of my life are not significantly affected by Obama,”  “unchanged because it will soon be in the hands of Trump.” ‘the same,” “the same,” “the same.” Those who didn’t know said they didn’t know   and among the “Others” were the ones who said “My personal future is not affected by Obama,”  “Obama has created the “I want and I will get” class of minorities,” and “Since I’m white, not much has changed for me personally.”

Expected Future of the Obama Legacy

The most significant finding of this Mini Poll on Americans’ expectations of the future as affected by the Obama Presidency is that they elected to view it in terms of being better or worse because of Obama and, most notably,   they viewed that future between “better and “worse” exactly down the middle (37/37 and 31/31). There was no “majority”: or “minority” opinion on the question of America’s future---the division they saw could not have been more definitive: Americans are evenly divided in their expectations of the future as either “better” or ”worse” because of the impact of the Obama Presidency.

To Confirm or Deny the Hypotheticals

About the Obama Legacy

The Confirm or Deny process of identifying a legacy in the society could require a national referendum for each and every claim made. Such referendums would be centered on the opinions and attitudes of all the citizens with particular attention paid to students who are deeply involved in the study of the nation’s history.

Decision making by referendum is important for settling a small number of the issues that define residential legacies. The way we “settle” an issue is via opinion sampling, or polls, (including Mini Polls!). To do so we put forth opinions as “the truth until proven otherwise by the facts,” called the hypothetical. The results of the poll “settles” issues with a sampling error of five percent or less ( if you are talking about a Gallup or Pew poll, with 1,000 or more respondents.)   In the case of the Mini Poll, with 100 or so respondents and an error rate of blah blah blah, what you get is the percentage of the respondents who “Agree” and thus “Confirm” the hypothetical or you get the percentage of the respondents who “Disagree” and thus “Deny” the validity of the hypothetical.   Without pretending to be “statistical,” you ignore the undecided ones (“Neither Agree or Disagree”} and subtract the lower from the higher number of “Agrees” and  “Disagrees,”  to get the “decision” in the opinions of these respondents. The higher the resulting number, the more seriously you take the decision.

Here, then, are a few hypotheticals representing some of the opinions of the author subjected to the “acid test” of the Mini Poll.

                        The Obama Presidency changed how Americans see America.

                        Agree                           Neither Agree or Disagree                  Disagree                                              63%                                                    33%                                            4%

                                                                                                                       

The Obama Presidency changed how Americans view other Americans who are different from themselves.

                        Agree                           Neither Agree or Disagree                  Disagree

                          51%                                                   34%                                   15%

                       

The Obama Presidency made America a more democratic society.

                         Agree              Neither Agree or Disagree                  Disagree

                            25%                                     36%                                                38%         

                        The Obama Presidency changed how Americans see themselves.

                           Agree                        Neither Agree or Disagree                      Disagree                                44%                                           43%                                            13%

Do you feel that you have more say about how the country is run today than you had eight years ago, or do you feel that you have the same or less say today?

About the same say today                  49%

Less say today                                                30%

More say today                                   21%

By simply applying the rules for Confirming or Denying  hypotheticals (subtracting the lesser from the greater values of the Agree/Disagree responses) we are able to identify the structure of this peep of the Obama legacy (according to this author and this Mini Poll).

The Obama Presidency…

                        “…changed how Americans see America.”

 CONFIRMED by 59% “Agree” majority.

“…changed how Americans view Americans who are different from themselves.”

CONFIRMED by 36% “Agree” plurality.

                        “…changed how Americans view themselves.”

CONFIRMED  by 31% “Agree” plurality.

                        “…made America a more democratic society”.

DENIED by 2% “Disagree” minority.

“…made Americans feel they had greater say in how the county is run.”

 DENIED BY 9% minority who said “Less say today”.

This peep at the Obama legacy suggests that he will be remembered for the positive influence he had on Americans’ attitudes towed themselves, toward Americans different from themselves and toward the Nation as a whole. The Obama influence however, was not enough to prevent the stark divisions Americans hold toward the future the country and for them personally. Americans who changed how they saw themselves did not necessarily see such changes in the future of the country. This dichotomy was most evident by their denial of the hypotheticals claiming that the Obama Presidency made them feel that they had a “greater say in how the country is run,” or that “the Obama Presidency made America a more democratic society.”