RALEIGH – The October voter poll from the Raleigh-based Civitas Institute contains some intriguing findings for political junkies, policy wonks, and even average North Carolinians (though if you are reading this column, I’m guessing that junky or wonk may best describe you).

Asked by Civitas to join my frequent sparring partner Chris Fitzsimon in a panel discussion of the survey results this week, I took a look at some previous statewide polls and current national polls to put the Civitas numbers in perspective. Several points leapt out at me.

First, North Carolinians seem less worried about how things are going than most of their fellow Americans are. There is a stock question in the polling trade, the “right track/wrong track.” At the national level, the average number of respondents saying the country is on the wrong track stands at about 65 percent. In North Carolina, the Civitas sample was asked whether the state was headed in the right direction or wrong direction. Only 40 percent said wrong, vs. 46 percent right and 15 percentage not sure (rounding can generate totals larger than 100 percent).

Why the discrepancy? For one thing, respondents may well distinguish between the direction of the country, characterized by the war in Iraq or the relief efforts in the Gulf, and the direction of the state, characterized by issues and trends closer to home. I’m inclined to think, however, that another factor is the native optimism of North Carolinians. Years ago, in a course at UNC-Chapel Hill on Southern culture, my classmates and I studied copious amounts of survey data demonstrating that when asked whether they were satisfied with their lives in their communities, North Carolinians almost always expressed the highest levels of satisfaction. Residents of states such as New York and New Jersey typically expressed the lowest.

Now that I think about it, the statistics may have converged a bit in the intervening years as all those sourpusses and worrywarts moved down here.

Another notable difference I saw was in approval ratings. At the national level, congressional approval ratings are abysmal – averaging 32 percent approve, 59 percent disapprove. But in the state poll, 43 percent approved of the job of the General Assembly, with 39 percent disapproving. Before state lawmakers pat themselves on the back for this, they may want to face the plain fact that, far more than is true with regard to Congress, the public simply doesn’t know who state legislators are and what they are up to. In a previous poll, Civitas found that only 35 percent of regular voters knew that the General Assembly raised taxes in 2005. Significant majorities either misidentified Jim Black and Marc Basnight as Republicans or said they had no idea which party led the legislature.

There are other nuggets in the poll worth chewing on another day, but regarding this morsel I submit that North Carolinians continue to be more-or-less happy with the way things are going in their lives – and to the extent politics intrudes, it does so in a sporadic and confusing manner.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.