Republicans’ outlook on the direction of the country has soured dramatically, according to a new AP-NORC poll that was conducted shortly after the assassination last week of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The share of Republicans who see the country headed in the right direction has fallen sharply in recent months, according to the September survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Today, only about half in the GOP see the nation on the right course, down from 75% in June. The shift is even more glaring among Republican women and the party's under-45 crowd.

Overall, about three-quarters of Americans say things in the country are headed the wrong direction, up from 62% in June.

Interviews with Republicans who took the poll suggest that political violence and nagging worries about social discord are playing a role in the notable shift in their mood after a summer scarred by killings of political figure on both sides of the political spectrum, although they also mentioned an other array of worries, including jobs, household costs and crime.

Views of the country's direction tend to be fairly stable, but major events sometimes shake partisans’ feelings about the state of the country, even when their party is in power. Democrats, for example, were more likely to say the U.S. was headed the wrong way after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned in June, 2022, the landmark Roe v. Wade case which upheld the federal right to abortion for almost 50 years. Democrat Joe Biden was president.

But the GOP shift in optimism, especially among younger Republicans and GOP women, is noteworthy for its scale. The drop in Republicans who see the country headed in the right direction is bigger than the decline between October 2020, when 47% of Republicans said the country was heading in the wrong direction, and December 2020, after Trump had lost reelection, when 31% of Republicans had an optimistic view of the country's direction. It's more similar in scope to the decline that occurred in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Among Republicans younger than 45, the decline is particularly glaring: 61% say the country is headed in the wrong direction, a spike of 30 percentage points since June, the last time the question was asked.