The share of U.S. adults expecting a high-quality life in five years crashed to 59.2% in 2025 — the lowest since Gallup started tracking this nearly two decades ago. Translation? Nearly 25 million fewer Americans feel hopeful about their future than they did just five years ago. You can imagine that the left will pounce on these numbers, but there’s something about them that they don’t want you to know.
This nosedive started under Joe Biden, not Donald Trump.
It was between 2021 and 2023 — squarely on Biden's watch — when Americans' future optimism tanked. Another 3.5-point drop followed in 2024-2025, continuing the slide Biden triggered. By late 2025, just 48% of Americans said they were "thriving," down from 59.2% in June 2021.
The timing matters. Gallup's Dan Witters pinpointed the culprit: Biden's inflation crisis. "Even as the pandemic was kind of receding, those affordability issues...had a lot to do with it," Witters told The Washington Post. Americans watched their grocery bills explode and their purchasing power evaporate while Biden gaslighted them about how Bidenomics was working for the people.
But here's where it gets interesting.
From 2021 to 2024, optimism dropped about five points across Democrats, Republicans, and independents—everyone felt the pain, and that reflected in the numbers. Then Trump returned to office, and suddenly Democrats' optimism plummeted an additional eight points in 2025 alone. Do you think that was a coincidence? During the same time, Republicans declined by just four points. Independents fell 6.5 points.
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“Many economic indicators and measures of consumers’ feelings about the economy have plummeted at various times since Covid, whether that was during the initial government-imposed lockdowns, inflation hitting 40-year highs, the housing market freezing over, etc.,” he told the Daily Caller. “Muddying the waters over the last year or so is the fact that Democrat respondents in polls have been allowing their hatred of President [Donald] Trump to cloud their view of the economy.”
In other words, Democrats are letting their Trump Derangement Syndrome poison their perception of reality, even as conditions are clearly improving.
“For example, Democrat respondents in the biased University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment have been expecting record-high inflation under Mr. Trump, which obviously hasn’t materialized,” E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, continued. “Nevertheless, these responses have dragged down the overall metrics of how people view the economy. However, even Republicans are not yet thrilled with the economy because it’s taking a while to undo all the damage from the Biden years.”
The data couldn't be clearer: Biden destroyed America's confidence in the future. Democrats, consumed by their loathing of Trump, refuse to acknowledge the economic realities in front of them.
Trump has nine months to reverse the trend before the midterm elections. If optimism rebounds, he'll get the credit, and Republicans will have a chance of holding onto their majority in November. If things don’t get better, Democrats will likely do well in the midterms. But the question isn't whether Americans lost faith in the future under Biden. They did. The question is whether Trump can restore it fast enough.
