American Optimism Hits 20-Year Low, Gallup Finds
American optimism about the future has fallen to its lowest level since Gallup began measuring it nearly two decades ago. Fewer than 60% of U.S. adults now believe they will be living “high-quality” lives five years from today, according to a new Gallup poll. That figure is down 3.5 percentage points from 2024 and nine points from 2020, during the height of the pandemic.
“I think that’s disconcerting, and says a lot about the mood of the American public today,” Dan Witters, research director for Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index, tells the Washington Post.
Declines Uneven Across Demographic Groups
The drop in optimism has not been uniform. Black adults — previously the most optimistic demographic about their futures — experienced the sharpest decline between 2021 and 2024, falling from 76.5% to 69.9%. Over the past year, however, Hispanic adults saw the largest decrease, slipping from 69% to 63%.
Political Divide Widens in 2025
From 2021 to 2024, Democrats, Republicans and independents each lost about five points in future optimism. But 2025 — the first year of President Trump’s return to the White House — marked a noticeable divergence. Democrats’ optimism dropped another 7.6 points, independents edged down slightly, and Republicans remained essentially unchanged.
Inflation, Politics and Lingering Pressures
Gallup researchers attribute the downturn to several overlapping factors. The decline from 2021 to 2023 coincided with elevated inflation, which strained household budgets even as the pandemic subsided. By 2024 and 2025, with inflation well below its peak and COVID-19 largely receded, political dynamics and uneven financial stress — particularly among Hispanic adults — appear to be playing a larger role.
“Even as the pandemic was kind of receding, those affordability issues, which of course linger on in not insignificant ways to this day, I think, had a lot to do with it,” Witters says.
