President Donald Trump rode Americans’ gloom over inflation and the economy to a surprising re-election in 2024. Then, a year later, upstart Democrats including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani rode “affordability” concerns to an even more surprising sweep.
It turns out that the inflation wave of 2021–23 was a really big deal, according to the mother of American opinion polls.
A long-running Gallup poll found that the percentage of American adults who anticipate a high-quality life in the next five years has fallen to 59.2%, its lowest share since the organization began asking this question nearly two decades ago.
The survey—based on data collected over four quarterly measurements in 2025 among 22,125 US adults—revealed a marked decline in sentiment, measuring a drop of 3.5 percentage points from 2024.
“If you look at the metric of optimism for future life, it really went down a lot from 2021 to 2023, and that corresponds really closely with the worst of the inflation crisis,” said Dan Witters, research director of the Gallup national index of health and well-being. Fortune. “The economic pressures of being able to afford things like food and fuel and gas and health care—that can really have a damaging effect.”
In addition, the study found that the number of Americans who rate both their current and future lives high enough to be characterized as “healthy” fell to 48%, down more than 11 points from their peak in June 2021, and the sixth-lowest ranking of the 176 measurements taken since 2008.
The results come as a confluence of factors disrupted the American way of life. Over the past several years, inflation, domestic conflict, economic uncertainty and political turmoil have made many Americans feel more pessimistic about the future. Americans’ confidence in finding a job has hit rock bottom, and home ownership has grown increasingly out of reach for younger generations. All this as the expanding K-shaped economy is leaving millions of Americans in the dust.
“Their optimism for the future is now waning,” Witters said. “[It’s] eroding at a rate that is kind of much greater than what we find in the way they evaluate their actual lives.”
Inflation and politics fuel pessimism
Yet even as inflation cooled in 2024, falling to 2.5% year-on-year in August, Americans remained pessimistic. Witters attributed that persistent pessimism to political partisanship.
“In 2025, the sharp decline among Democrats combined with no change this time among Republicans do not cancel each other out. And so you have that real net negative in the overall US total.”
Witters mentions that it is common for life ratings to vary dramatically among political parties when control of the White House changes. Still, expectations for a high-quality life have declined significantly among Democrats, a 7.6 percentage point drop in future life ratings from 2024. For context, Republican sentiment dropped 5.9 percentage points after Biden took office in 2021 while Democrats’ optimism rose 4.4 points.
Yet even among Republicans, optimism rose by just 0.9 points last year. And the optimism of the Independents decreased by 1.5 points.
“I think to the extent that that kind of partisanship can kind of influence the overall national numbers, clearly that’s happening here,” Witters said.
Gallup asked respondents to choose a step on a scale numbered from zero to 10 that best represents their quality of life, where zero indicates the worst possible life and 10 indicates the best possible life.
By race and ethnicity, Hispanic adults saw the sharpest drop in optimism from the previous year, down six points. White adults also saw a notable decline of 4.6 points, while sentiment among Black Americans fell by 2.2 points.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com