President Donald Trump rode Americans’ gloom about inflation and the economy to a surprising reelection in 2024. Then, a year later, upstart Democrats including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani rode concerns about “affordability” to an even more surprising sweep.
It turns out the inflation wave of 2021–23 was a really big deal, according to the mother of American opinion polling.
A long-running Gallup poll found the percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate a high-quality life within the next five years slumped to 59.2%, its lowest share since the organization began asking this question nearly two decades ago.
The poll—based on data collected over four quarterly measurements in 2025 among 22,125 U.S. adults—revealed a notable decline in sentiment, measuring a 3.5-percentage-point drop-off from 2024.
“If you look at the optimism metric for future life, that really came down a lot from 2021 to 2023, and that corresponds really closely with the worst of the inflation crisis,” Dan Witters, research director of the Gallup national health and well-being index, told Fortune. “The economic pressures of being able to afford things like food and fuel and gas and health care—that really can have a deleterious effect.”
