Science
- Most people's New Year's resolutions are related to self-improvement.
- INSIDER surveyed more than 1,000 Americans about what they think President Donald Trump's New Year's resolutions should be for 2019.
- We discovered that many people want Trump to "tweet less" or simply "resign."
New Year's resolutions aren't easy to keep: 80% of our resolutions tend to fail by February.
Still, with a fresh year on the horizon, it's tempting to fantasize about what we might do better in 2019.
Or perhaps what others might do better.
To get a read on what Americans want from their president in the coming year, INSIDER - a sister publication of Business Insider - posed the following question to 1,037 people across the country:
What is a New Year's resolution you'd like President Donald Trump to make? ___________
Responses to our online fill-in-the-blank SurveyMonkey form ranged from some extremely vulgar answers that can't be printed here to some simple, supportive suggestions like "continue" (5.7%) or "build the wall" (2.8%). That seems to align with Trump's own plans for the new year, since he has pledged to keep the government shut down until a $5 billion southern border wall is funded.
Other survey responses focused on self-improvement ideas for Trump. But of the 1,037 people we surveyed, 213 suggested that the president should "resign" and leave office. That was by far the most popular response.
The second most popular answer was and "tweet less" - more than 10% of survey respondents suggested this. President Trump tweets, on average, more than five times a day, often disparaging the media as "fake news" or criticizing the government's Russia investigation. Over the last year, he's posted hundreds of comments on Twitter, even going so far as to brag that his "Nuclear Button" is bigger than North Korea's.
Below are the most common responses to our survey, from Americans of all political stripes. You may notice that a common theme seems to be a desire for Trump to improve the way he communicates. Whether encouraging him to tweet less, be kinder, be honest, or speak cautiously, people are clearly thinking about ways Trump could be a more thoughtful leader in the new year.
Some less frequent survey responses - which still garnered more than a handful of supporters - included suggestions that Trump "respect others," "work for other Americans," and "improve US." Other answers, as we said, were too vulgar to include in this chart.
Fewer than 1% of respondents gave Trump a traditional New Year's resolution: 0.7% thought that he should lose weight and exercise more in the new year.
SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn't try to weight its sample based on race or income. Total 1,037 respondents polled November 23-24, 2018, margin of error plus or minus 3.15 percentage points with 95% confidence level.