Has morning really dawned in America? More Americans certainly believe so than they have in years -- even though it may not be twenty years. 

That claim came from Rasmussen Reports' Mark Mitchell, based on its own latest survey. Donald Trump has a 10-point advantage now in job approval as well as a three-point advantage in the passion positions, both remarkably different than in his first term. However, the real change is in the right/wrong direction tracker, which went positive in Rasmussen's series for the first time in two decades, according to Mitchell: 

Breaking: A 20 year daily trend ends, this is a big one. https://t.co/5XImapgWHr pic.twitter.com/IrSmJt08bx

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) February 13, 2025

I no longer subscribe to Rasmussen, so I don't have any idea how close this ran during Trump's first presidential term, or even whether it was close at any time during the Biden or Obama eras. (We'll get back to that in a moment.) The positive result is pretty remarkable nonetheless, because this tends to act as a way for people to express frustration of any kind with the status quo no matter how good it might be. Congressional approval ratings act in the same fashion; the overall rating is always bad, even when most people actually approve of the job their own representative is doing, especially if they are of the same party. 

But is this an outlier? Kinda. A check at RealClearPolling, which tracks and aggregates surveys on right/wrong direction, shows that the overall average remains in double-digit negative territory. But it's closing rapidly over the last month or so, and the graph shows how unusual the current position is:

The streams may have crossed at Rasmussen, but so far they haven't crossed anywhere else yet-- except at Emerson. They also came up with a positive result in their survey on direction, and saw marked improvement in the response from both Republicans and independents. Democrats ... not so much:

A majority of voters (52%) think the United States is headed in the right direction, while 48% think it is on the wrong track. This is a significant shift from earlier this month when 67% said the country was on the wrong track and 33% in the right direction. 

“The shift is rooted in a flip of Republican perception and lessening of independents who say the country is on the wrong track,” Kimball noted. “Earlier this month, 70% of Republicans felt the country was on the wrong track, now 87% feel it is headed in the right direction. The share of independents who say the country is on the wrong track decreased from 69% to 53%, while Democrats’ perception that the country is on the wrong track intensified from 62% to 79%.” 

No one should be surprised to watch Democrats wail and gnash their teeth, almost literally in some circles, now that Trump has clearly taken charge. The demo to watch here are independents, which in the Emerson poll lines up pretty accurately to the overall RCP aggregate average. Given the context and ambiguity of the question itself, this is a very good result for the Trump administration -- in the moment, anyway.

This brings us to the 20-years argument. This graph covers almost that entire span, and note that the streams at least touched in June 2009, sixteen years ago. For a brief moment, the RCP aggregate showed a tie at 45.8% shortly after Barack Obama took charge and attempted a muscular legislative and executive agenda to rescue America from the perceived chaos of the Great Recession. 

But look what happened almost immediately afterward; as Obama pushed for nationalizing health care and the economy failed to ignite, the wrong direction numbers rapidly overcame the momentary good will built on firm leadership. By the time of the disastrous 2010 midterm for Obama, the aggregate was 17 points to the negative, and a year later bottomed out at forty-seven points negative in 2011 before rebounding back to -17 for Obama's reelection effort. It didn't get better than -17 until Trump took office, where Trump held it down to a relatively narrow gap until the pandemic hit. 

Even Joe Biden got a bounce in this measure, albeit brief. Voters cheered up in the change of leadership during the pandemic, although the gap never got better than -7.4 at the beginning of June 2021. That summer, by the way, was the last time that any pollster reported a positive result until the last couple of weeks. Even before Biden's shameful rout out of Kabul and the abandonment  of 14,000 Americans to the Taliban in Afghanistan, those numbers began rapidly deteriorating for Biden, and after that never recovered from historically rock-bottom extended ratings. 

What makes this different? Perhaps not much, but the rapidity of the change certainly speaks to real enthusiasm and optimism. So too does the reappearance of individual poll results reporting net-positive scores on the direction question. The last such poll, as I mentioned above, was an outlier +14 Harvard-Harris poll in mid-June 2021, six weeks and 25 polls after the last previous positive result from Morning Consult at the beginning of May (a +2). One positive is a good sign; two pollsters returning net-positives in roughly the same period of time is a stronger indication of a real "vibe shift," so to speak. 

The trick, though, is maintaining it. Trump managed to maintain a smaller net-negative gap in his first term than either Obama or Biden did during their presidencies, mainly because both men ran on centrism and then attempted to impose a radical-progressive agenda. Trump at least ran on the idea of draining the swamp and imposing sweeping reforms on the bureaucratic state and trade and foreign policy. His moderate impact in his first term could speak to a lack of focus on those populist agenda items; if Trump really delivers this time, it truly could open up a new era of American optimist.

It may not be "morning in America" yet. But now we can at least see the first rays of light on the horizon.