President Donald Trump capitalized on Americans’ pessimism about inflation and the economy to win a surprise re-election in 2024. A year later, upstart Democrats, including New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, leveraged concerns about “affordability” to achieve an even more surprising sweep.
It turns out that the 2021-23 inflation wave is indeed a big deal, according to the mother of American polls.
A long-running Gallup poll found that the share of U.S. adults who expect to have a high quality of life within the next five years has dropped to 59.2%, the lowest share since the organization began asking the question nearly two decades ago.
The poll, based on four quarterly measurements of 22,125 U.S. adults in 2025, showed a significant decline in sentiment, down 3.5 percentage points from 2024.
“If you look at optimism about the future of life, it does drop a lot from 2021 to 2023, which is very close to the height of the inflation crisis,” said Dan Witters, research director of Gallup’s National Index of Health and Well-being. wealth. “The financial pressure to afford things like food, fuel, gas and health care can really have a harmful impact.”
Additionally, the study found that the number of Americans who rate their current and future lives high enough to be described as “prosperous” fell to 48%, down more than 11 percentage points from a high in June 2021 and the sixth-lowest rating of all 176 measures since 2008. The last time the score was below current levels was in April 2020, a month after the coronavirus first hit the United States.
This result comes amid a combination of factors hampering the American way of life. Over the past few years, inflation, civil strife, economic uncertainty, and political unrest have made many Americans feel more pessimistic about the future. american confidence looking for a job has hit rock bottom, home ownership has hit rock bottom growing day by day It is beyond the reach of the younger generation. All this continues to expand K-shaped economy Leaving millions of Americans in the dust.
“Their optimism about the future is now waning,” Wieters said. “(It) is eroding much faster than we find them assessing their current lives.”
Inflation and politics fuel pessimism
However, despite inflation cooling in 2024, falling to 2.5% year-on-year in August of the same year, Americans remain pessimistic. Wieters attributes the continued pessimism to political partisanship.
“A sharp decline in Democratic support coupled with no change in Republican support by 2025 will not cancel each other out. So the overall net negative for the U.S. is real.”
Wieters noted that when control of the White House changes, it’s common for life ratings to fluctuate significantly between political parties. Despite this, Democrats’ expectations for a high quality of life have dropped significantly, with future life ratings falling 7.6 percentage points from 2024. For context, after Biden took office in 2021, Republican sentiment fell by 5.9 points, while optimism among Democrats rose by 4.4 points.
Even among Republicans, however, optimism rose only 0.9 percentage points last year. Optimism among independents fell by 1.5 percentage points.
“I think that partisanship may be affecting the overall numbers across the country, and clearly that’s happening,” Wieters said.
Gallup asks respondents to choose the step that best represents their quality of life on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 represents the worst possible life and 10 represents the best life possible.
By race and ethnicity, Hispanic adults experienced the largest decline in optimism from the previous year, down 6 percentage points. Sentiment among white adults also fell significantly by 4.6 percentage points, while sentiment among black Americans fell by 2.2 percentage points.