into the election year.

Most of those polls, however, are

what we call horse race polls.

Who's up, who's down, the candidates

compared against each other.

We at FT felt that we should do something slightly different,

particularly since one of the things President Trump has

constantly said, is his case for re-election is

built on his economic record.

We felt we wanted to see whether the American people agreed

and whether they thought his economic record

and his economic policies were actually making them better off

than they were four years ago, in that famous Ronald Reagan

question that he asked in 1980.

So we asked 1,000 voters: do they

feel better off than they were four years ago?

And the answer, frankly, came back as a surprise to us.

Two-thirds of the respondents said they weren't better off.

Now this comes despite the fact that we have market records

in the financial markets.

We have an economic expansion that is at record levels

as well.

And I think what that shows us is the dynamic that happened

in 2016, where you had a lot of working-class and middle-class

voters who were very angry, because expansion hasn't gotten

to them yet, that dynamic hasn't changed just because Donald

Trump is president.

And I think, frankly, that is problematic for Donald Trump.

If, indeed, as we've seen on Twitter and recent rallies,

he is trying to convince those voters to support him again,

and they don't feel that his policies have helped them yet,

that could really hinder the president's ability

to make the argument to re-elect him in 2020.

Why people feel they're not better off.

The number-one reason is wages, wages and income.

Now, we've seen this borne out, again, in the data.

Just on last week, we saw that the US jobs report for October

showed that wages, although growing slightly,

are nowhere near the growth levels they were pre-crisis.

So the whole big market boom, the whole big economic boom,

has not filtered down yet to your hourly wages

that affects your working-class and middle-class voter.

Number two was level of debt, both for personal and family.

So what you're seeing is a lot of credit-card debt,

a lot of student debt, a lot of auto debt.

Again, things that precipitated the crisis 10 years ago.

A lot of families are feeling overburdened,

and they're worried about things like the trade war, which

was interesting to us, also.

The number one thing they're worried about

is trade tensions with China, with Mexico, with the US's

biggest trading partners.

But also, number two is because of healthcare costs.

You have a combination of worries

about their personal debt and worries about healthcare costs.

And you've seen the Democrats really hammer on that.

That helped them in the midterms of 2018.

They focused very much on healthcare costs

and how that's impacting middle-class voters.

And you're seeing it again in the Democratic primaries,

really hammering this issue of healthcare

and pushing a Medicaid for All because of that issue.

So one of the other things we decided to do with this poll,

is we're going to track every month up until election day

whether voters think they're better off than they

were four years ago.

But we also wanted to take a snapshot

on particular issues that are affecting voters

at that moment in time.

The one we asked for this month's poll

is, how concerned are you about violence in the Middle East,

and to what extent should the Trump administration

take rising oil prices into consideration

when they decide whether to engage in hostilities with Iran

or other belligerents in the region?

And surprisingly, to me at least,

we saw 55 per cent of Americans said, yes, you should take this

into consideration.

And that is very interesting to watch,

as the president has really gone back and forth

on the extent to which he wants to deploy

US forces in the region, and the extent to which he wants

to particularly confront Iran.

Remember, John Bolton, national security adviser,

who was very adamant, very hard-line towards Iran,

wanting to actually launch hostilities and counterbalance

Iran through the use of military force.

He was basically pushed out, because Donald Trump disagreed

with him.

And to a certain extent, that is because Trump

is very worried about his domestic economic record,

again, when he goes for re-election.