AP poll: Trust in US government info drops across issues — SkimNews
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- The AP-NORC/USA Facts poll found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults have little or no trust in federal government information on the environment, foreign affairs, elections and politics, abortion, or immigration, with mistrust rising on nearly every topic asked about since 2019.
- Trust in federal education information rose from 37% expressing low trust in 2019 to 53% now, including a 9-percentage-point jump in the past year alone.
- The partisan gap has widened dramatically: 61% of Democrats have low trust in federal budget information versus 42% of Republicans, and 60% of Democrats have low trust in crime information compared with just 32% of Republicans.
- Election certification trust is collapsing — only 34% of all U.S. adults trust government certifications of election results "a great deal" or "quite a bit," down from 40% in 2024, and Democratic trust specifically fell from 65% to 44%.
- Vaccination recommendations are the lone bipartisan exception to the partisan divide, with about 6 in 10 Democrats, Republicans, and independents all saying they trust federal vaccine information "only a little" or "not at all."
- Campaign messaging fares even worse than government information, with only about 1 in 10 U.S. adults saying Democratic or Republican campaign messages are "always" or "often" based in factual information.
- The poll surveyed 1,036 adults from July 29 to Aug. 10 via NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
Why it matters: The partisan trust gap now exceeds 25 points on issues like crime and the federal budget, and Democrats' trust in election certifications collapsed from 65% to 44% in a single year — leaving both parties' bases deeply skeptical of the same federal institutions just months before the 2026 midterms.
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