Gallup Detects a Significant Shift in American Optimism

American optimism about the future has slid to its lowest point since Gallup began tracking it nearly 20 years ago. Just under 60% of US adults now expect to be living "high-quality" lives five years from now, according to a new Gallup poll. That's down 3.5 points since 2024 and 9 points since 2020, the peak 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.

• The declines have not been evenly spread. Black adults, once the most optimistic group about their futures, saw the steepest drop from 2021 to 2024 (76.5% to 69.9%), while Hispanic adults registered the largest fall in the past year (from 69% to 63%).
• Politically, Democrats, Republicans, and independents all lost about 5 points of future optimism between 2021 and 2024. But 2025—a year marked by President Trump's return to the White House—brought a sharp split: Democrats' optimism fell another 7.6 points, independents dipped slightly, and Republicans held steady.
• Gallup points to a mix of forces behind the shift. A 2021-23 slide aligned with high inflation that strained household budgets even as the pandemic eased. With inflation off its peak and COVID largely in the rearview, the 2024-25 declines appear more tied to politics and uneven financial pressures, particularly for Hispanic adults.
• "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.