President Donald Trump rode Americans’ frustrations about inflation and the economy to a surprise re-election in 2024. Then, a year later, upstart Democrats, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, rode concerns about the “deal” into an even more surprising sweep.
It made the inflation wave of 2021-23 a really big deal, according to the Mother of American Opinion polls.
A long-running Gallup poll found that the percentage of American adults who expect a high quality of life within the next five years fell to 59.2 percent, the lowest since the organization began asking the question nearly two decades ago.
The survey—based on data collected among 22,125 U.S. adults in four quarterly measurements through 2025—showed a significant drop in sentiment, measuring a 3.5-percentage-point drop-off from 2024.
“If you look at the metric of optimism for future life, that actually came down a lot from 2021 to 2023, and that really coincides with the worst inflationary crisis,” said Dan Witters, research director of the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index. fate. “The financial pressures of being able to afford things like food and fuel and gas and health care — that can have a really detrimental effect.”
Furthermore, the study found that the number of Americans who rated both their current and future lives highly as “favourable” fell to 48%, down 11 points from the June 2021 high, and the sixth-lowest rating among all 176 measures taken since 2008. Last time the rating was down. America
The results come from a confluence of factors that have disrupted the American way of life. Over the past several years, inflation, domestic conflict, economic uncertainty, and political turmoil have made many Americans feel more pessimistic about the future. Americans’ confidence in job seekers has hit rock-bottom, and homeownership is increasingly unattainable for younger generations. The expansion of the K-shaped economy is leaving millions of Americans in the dust.
“Their optimism for the future is now diminishing,” Wieters said. “[It’s] How they evaluate their current lives is declining at a much greater rate than we find.”
Inflation and politics fuel pessimism
Yet even as inflation cooled in 2024, falling to 2.5% year over year from August, Americans remained pessimistic. Withers attributed that persistent pessimism to political bias.
“In 2025, the big decline among Democrats and no change among Republicans this time will not cancel each other out. And so you have a real net negative in the overall American total.”
Withers noted that it is common for life ratings to swing dramatically between political parties when control of the White House changes. Still, expectations for a higher quality of life declined significantly among Democrats, with a 7.6 percentage point drop in future life assessments from 2024. For context, Republicans’ sentiment fell 5.9 percentage points after Biden took office in 2021 while Democrats’ optimism rose 4.4 points.
Even among Republicans, however, optimism rose by just 0.9 points last year. And independents’ optimism fell 1.5 points.
“I think that kind of partisanship can affect the overall national numbers, which is clearly happening here,” Wieters said.
Gallup asks respondents to choose a step on a scale from zero to 10 that best represents their quality of life, where zero indicates the worst possible life and 10 the best possible life.
By race and ethnicity, Hispanic adults saw the biggest drop in optimism from the previous year, falling by six points. White adults also saw a significant drop of 4.6 points, while sentiment among black Americans fell 2.2 points.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
