After the election? The figure sank to 27 percent.

The short answer for why is that Democrats were powering the strength in satisfaction. Before the election, Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to win (as did a big chunk of Republicans and independents), and things seemed as if they were moving forward in the right way. Then Nov. 8 happened.

Republicans were always more skeptical about where things were headed, and the slight uptick after Donald Trump's victory did not do much to offset the new pessimism among Democrats (and, to a lesser extent, independents).

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We can pretty clearly separate out the presidency from broader attitudes about government. For all of the talk about how Americans viewed the country as being on the wrong track, they still overwhelmingly approved of the job that Obama was doing. Trump's outsider status was certainly appealing to a lot of voters, but as we noted in October, there may be some element of the “wrong track” poll numbers that relates to concerns about what Trump's candidacy (and election) says about the direction of the country.

Throughout the campaign, polling regularly showed that more people thought the country was headed in the wrong direction than thought we were on the right track.

But that ha been the case from the outset of Obama's candidacy, to some extent. Huffington Post Pollster has catalogued 1,534 polls asking the right-track question since January 2009. In 1,515 of them, Americans thought that the country was on the wrong track.

What we found when looking into it was that the question broadly tracked with attitudes on Congress, which is to say, overall attitudes about government.

How do we know that Americans' thinking the country is on the wrong track did not result in uniform support for Trump? Exit polling shows that Clinton won a quarter of the vote from people who said the country was “seriously off on the wrong track.”

Remember: Attitudes about Obama specifically have consistently improved over the past 18 months. In the wake of the election, Gallup found that Obama's approval rating spiked to 57 percent — powered by a short-term uptick among Democrats and independents.

Since June 2015, independents have viewed Obama more favorably by 17 points, according to Gallup, including five points since right before the election. That looks a bit like the “satisfied” numbers: a quick change in the wake of the election.

On Wednesday, The Post released a new poll conducted with the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. We asked people about how optimistic they were about the next 12 months, a reflection of how people felt about the prospect of Trump's first year in office. Democrats and Clinton voters were far more pessimistic than Trump voters and Republicans — and independents were about in the middle.

Suddenly, Democrats are not excited about the immediate future of the country. That's true of a sizable chunk of independents, too. Most people consistently dislike government and think it is a mess, but Obama was treated as an exception by members of his own party. The seemingly likely prospect of replacing Obama with Clinton made Democrats content that things were looking up. Congress was bad and Washington is screwed up, many figured, but at least Trump was not going to win!