U.S. poll: 72 percent dissatisfied

NEW YORK, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- Exactly 12 months before the next federal election, 72 percent of U.S. citizens said they are unhappy with the country's course, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed.

In a poll of 1,009 adults taken between Oct. 12-14, 26 percent said they were satisfied with the country's direction, the newspaper said in a report Thursday.

The report said the last time the dissatisfaction was so high was when President George H.W. Bush was voted out of office in 1992 and the Reform Party's Ross Perot took the highest percentage of the vote of any third-party candidate in 80 years.

The unhappiness isn't limited to one party -- 55 percent of Republicans are unhappy, while 84 percent of Democrats feel the country's going the wrong way.

"The war in Iraq is clearly a major drag on the public's sense of how the country's doing," Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota told USA Today.

The poll's statistical margin of error is 3 percentage points.