Partisan differences in attitudes about satisfaction with the federal government

The Gallup Poll released one of its periodic measures of how satisfied people are with the performance of the federal government along about 20 categories. They broke the results down by party identification and found an unsurprising result. Democratic identifiers are more satisfied with the federal government now than Republicans, but when the same questions were asked in 2005, the reverse was true.

The only real difference between now and then was the party membership of the president.

This confirms a point many make about party identification, it provides a lense through which people make evaluations about questions regarding things like the performance of governing institutions. When a Republican is president, Republican outlets say nice and positive things which are accepted by Republican identifiers while they ignore contrary messages by Democratic outlets. And the opposite is true when a Democrat is in the White House.

Here are two tables with Gallup's data. Note the differences between the two as well as the places where there has been a complete flip in attitudes about performance. Has policy really changed that much in each of these policy arenas to justify the shift?

From 2013:


From 2005: