Poll: Government Poses Immediate Threat to Rights and Freedoms

Almost half of Americans say the federal government poses an immediate threat to citizens’ rights and freedoms, according to results from a poll released Monday that show an upward trend over the past decade of the percentage of Americans who see the government as a threat.

Forty-nine percent of Americans said the federal government poses “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens,” according to the Gallup survey, which is up from 46 percent in 2013 and equal to the percentage who said so in 2011.

Those numbers are up from 37 percent in 2005 and 30 percent in 2003, according to Gallup.

Gallup’s Frank Newport wrote that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say the federal government posed an immediate threat than Republicans during the George W. Bush administration. Since President Obama was sworn in, the trend has flipped, with the percentage of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who now say government is a more than doubling the number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who say so, 65 percent to 32 percent.

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