In January of 2012, during Obama's first term, Reuters-Ipsos began a daily tracking poll asking respondents whether the US is "headed in the right or wrong direction". The percentage answering "right direction", is, at this moment, in March of 2017, at the highest level ever recorded during that entire period of time. Correspondingly, the percentage of people who think the US is on the "wrong track" is at its lowest level since R-I rolled the survey out over five years ago:
Those results are for all Americans. Among whites, the current "right direction" response isn't just at a record high, it's twice what it averaged through Obama's two terms. We want our country back:
Rasmussen's version of the same type of daily tracking survey began the week Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009. It hit its highest "right direction" and lowest "wrong direction" marks the week of January 22, 2017, immediately after Trump's inauguration, and the relative optimism has held steady since then.
That is, in Trump's less than two months in office the percentage of Americans who feel the country is moving in the right direction is higher than it ever was at any point during either of Obama's two terms.
I stumbled onto this and was genuinely surprised by what I found. Shame on me for expecting fake news to alert us of something newsworthy, I guess.