FiveThirtyEight: “Americans are feeling uneasy, and it’s hard to blame them. The things they want to change — inflation, COVID-19 case numbers, rising violent crime in some cities — seem more and more intractable. There was one big, abrupt shift in American life at the end of June, when the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. But that wasn’t a change most Americans wanted. This sense of dissatisfaction showed up in a recent poll from Gallup, which asked Americans how much confidence they have in various institutions. The survey found that since last June, when Gallup last asked this set of questions, Americans’ confidence in almost every institution has dropped. In the poll, which was conducted before the justices released their decision on abortion but after a draft of the opinion leaked, the biggest shifts were for the presidency, which saw a 15-percentage-point drop, and the Supreme Court, which saw an 11-point drop. But overall, the national mood is sour. Americans’ average confidence in 14 of the institutions that Gallup asked about was only at 27 percent — the lowest point since Gallup began the survey in 1979…”