Americans’ Optimism About The Future Drops To New Record Low, Poll Shows

Americans’ optimism about the future plunged to a new record low in 2025, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday.

The survey found that the percentage of U.S. adults who expect to lead high-quality lives in five years — a metric Gallup calls “future life ratings” — dropped to 59.2% last year, marking the lowest level since Gallup began asking this question nearly two decades ago. Meanwhile, future life ratings have declined a total of 9.1 percentage points since 2020, projecting to an estimated 24.5 million less Americans who presently feel hopeful about the future versus that year, the poll shows.

The majority of that drop occurred between 2021 and 2023, but future life ratings notably fell by 3.5 percentage points between 2024 and 2025, according to Gallup.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, the percentage of Americans who rated both their current and future lives highly enough to be considered “thriving” plunged to 48.0%, marking a decline of over 11 points from the 59.2% peak measured in June 2021, the survey suggests. Moreover, future life optimism among all three major political identity groups declined roughly five percentage points from 2021 to 2024, according to the poll.

The newly released Gallup poll did not ask those surveyed to give the reasoning behind their responses. However, Dan Witters, the research director for Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the recent drop in Americans’ optimism began amid high inflation during 2021 and 2022, which occurred under former President Joe Biden’s administration. Witters told the outlet that “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.”