The number of Americans who anticipate they will have “high-quality lives” in five years’ time has dropped to a nearly two-decade low, according to a poll released Tuesday.
Around 6 in 10 people surveyed said they expected their lives would be significantly better in the future than today. That is about nine percentage points lower than during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, according to Gallup, which began measuring Americans’ sense of optimism in 2008.
“I think that’s disconcerting, and says a lot about the mood of the American public today,” said Dan Witters, the research director for Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index.
American optimism is down across the board by 3.5 percentage points since 2024, and Hispanic adults have had the greatest drop in optimism in the past year, from about 69 percent to roughly 63 percent, according to Gallup. (The new figures are based on four quarterly surveys conducted throughout 2025 involving 22,125 respondents, and the poll’s margin of error is plus or minus half a percentage point. The margin is higher — plus or minus two percentage points — for divisions of race and political party.)
Gallup has used two questions to gauge the national mood as part of its National Health and Well-Being Index. Its poll asked around 22,000 adult respondents to rank their current life — and where they imagine their lives will be in five years’ time — on a scale of 1 to 10.
Both ratings have slumped over the past five years across a pandemic, affordability issues, turbulent national politics and global conflicts. The steep drop in optimism in 2025 suggests some Americans think their lives will worsen still, Witters said.
In the past year, around 62 percent of American adults ranked their current life at a 7 or higher, and around 59 percent anticipated their life in five years’ time would rank at an 8 or higher, according to Gallup.
The Gallup poll did not ask respondents to give reasons for their answers, but Witters said the recent slump in optimism began as high inflation rates staggered American consumers in 2021 and 2022, during the Biden administration.
“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 said.
The downturn has persisted after the reelection of Donald Trump. Democrats feel a lot worse about their future, reporting a 7.6 percentage-point drop in ratings of their future lives from 2024, while independents’ future ratings dipped by 1.5 percentage points. Republicans’ future life ratings increased by 0.9 percentage points.
It is common for optimism among partisans to swing after a new party wins the White House, but changes among Democrats and Republicans largely offset each other in 2021, after when Joe Biden was elected president, Witters said. That was not the case in 2025.
Black and Hispanic adults reported some of the largest declines in optimism in recent years. Witters said the trend suggests that minority groups have been hit hardest by affordability issues.
That Hispanic adults reported the steepest drop in optimism in 2025 — coupled with the partisan divide in optimism — could suggest Trump’s policies are partly to blame, Witters said. Latino voters swung against the Republican Party in November’s special elections, a break Democrats claim is a repudiation of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.
Can American morale recover? Witters said Gallup’s polling is “highly sensitive to changes that are going on in the world” and has seen the country emerge from other periods of pessimism.
“There’s no reason to think that that can’t happen again,” Witters said. “It’s just a bit of a trough right now.”
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